[regal]

I think the most important thing is transparency and correct expectations. If they set clear expectations, and they are transparent about how well they are meeting them, then it just comes down to delivery.

Agreed. So long as a customer knows what he/she's signing up for, and gets that, everything's fine. I might have misread what the "99.99% uptime guarantee" was supposed to be for and gotten too excited about it / taken it too seriously when I first signed up, or maybe this is for something else that's too complicated for a part-time tech guy like me to understand.

When I'd log in when the site was down, half the time CloudFlare would have the green arrow next to the site with a "Site Online" type indicator; other times it'd have the brown dot-dot-dot "Site Offline" indicator. I'd confirm numbers on this but apparently the service doesn't save this or makes it no longer available to you on account termination. Pingdom Tools would report the site as down, and when visiting the site, it wouldn't load, or would take 10+ seconds to load. There would also frequently be a "This website is offline; no cached version is available" page from CloudFlare when trying to load the site, even on the homepage, despite the guarantee to supposedly be saving and serving cached copies of the site in the event of downtime (and despite that being what I thought we were paying for, mainly) - sometimes those cached copies would show up too; though more often, there'd just be this page:

http://image2.romantika.name/2013/01/cloudflare-website-offl...