If you're such a high volume site then why not pay for CDN/DDOS Protection? I'm amazed so many people feel this is something they deserve for free, and then complain when there's some kind of limitation on the free thing they're receiving.

If someone gave me a free car and I suddenly discovered that it had stopped working at 8:30am on Monday morning because the free car plan didn't support peak hour, just when I needed it most, I'd be annoyed as hell. This would be the case no matter how much I got paid at my job. Getting a nasty surprise because you didn't realise a product was inferior is upsetting for reasons that should be pretty obvious.

Admittedly the cloudflare free plan does say it's for things "that aren’t business-critical", but what does that actually mean in terms of resource quota and expected uptime?

I don't care as much for DDOS protection as for free easy SSL which gets semi annoying to set up for me personally. I assumed cloudflare was an option from their advertisment and never worried about it. Now I suppose I will.

So I looked on their site and they charge $20 a month for 4 hour support response for urgent issues. [0]

Isn't that quite reasonable? Especially if you're scared if your site goes down.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/plans/