idp

Apologies, that was a poor choice of wording on my part. While I do entertain the theoretical possibility that CF silently uses low-tier customer data in interesting ways (such as data mining and tracking user behavior), my actual expectations of the way CF actually uses this data exactly matches your description (DDoS mitigation & things like that).

Of course we were puzzled by CloudFlare's pricing structure. However, all of their advertising material kept reiterating that they were making money off low-tier customers by collecting lots of data required to properly serve their business and enterprise customers. So our sense of alarm and disbelief was somewhat suspended until CF contacted us about our bandwidth consumption, but even then we didn't realize how much trouble we were facing, as they first told us that a $1k subscription would do the trick.

Watching competing projects also added some degree of assurance. Without giving out any specific names, we are aware of a number of competing projects that even now keep heavily relying on CloudFlare (although I am obviously unaware of how much they pay), so we didn't consider it an abusive behavior. In contrast, we were also aware of at least one competitor that kept pushing a considerable portion of their uploads to imgur and basically parasitizing on them for a long time until imgur's abuse team finally took notice and brought down the hammer.

Sure as hell we don't. Setting up AdSense and content recommendations widgets did the trick for a long time and allowed the project to grow; the team has not been active enough in exploring better monetization channels. Also, before PostImage came to use CF, it used a number of cool tricks to conserve bandwidth that had since then been cut out as they were incompatible with CDN caching. Source: I'm with the team.

The project is now certainly larger than it was expected to become, although this doesn't absolve the team of not taking preemptive action sooner. Disclaimer: I'm with the team.

Because early in the negotiation phase CF sales rep said that a $1k/mo plan would be a good enough upgrade, and this was an unpleasant but a sustainable figure.

One server would not be nearly enough. PI is running on 14 dedicated machines, and even this is not enough to handle the load without a caching CDN. Source: I'm with the team.

RoboCV (http://robocv.com/), a pretty good Russian company is missing from the list. These are the same guys who were participants of Google Lunar X Prize but aborted midway due to lack of funding.

NK can be considered a natural disaster or something else that you cannot bargain with (unless you're with the Chinese government). Holding NK at fault here is about as practical as holding at fault gravity if the guy tried to vandalize an ad billboard, fell down, broke his spine and spent the next 15 years paralyzed. So if this guy really did what the news claims he did, he has a rather big problem with his mental abilities. Saying "he doesn't actually deserve 15 years in prison" is akin to saying "he doesn't actually deserve 15 years in a hospital ward". Perhaps he doesn't, but the world works on causal chains rather than fairness.