Cloudflare took down our site after trying to force us to pay $120k within 24h

And that’s why they should never offer “unlimited” plans, because edge cases will cause issues. I would have definitely opened a support ticket right away the moment you found you you were talking to sales. Those two organizations tend to be diametrically opposed and you can usually find out what’s going on when commission isn’t involved.

This is a problem in general when relying on other vendors for things. I know you can’t just spin up your own CDN, but not locking yourself in goes a long way. The article gives some good tips for how to safeguard your company, especially around domain names, that’s the big thing. It would have been easy to change up an A record and point to a static page saying “Sorry, CloudFlare fucked us” as long as you still control DNS.