Traffic seems improving, but the search queries I am recieving are quite bad. They are not the same genre as I used to recieve.
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It does give me hope. But when things started to finally improve on google's end, CF did me very dirty.
I was using their free database and had billions of daily row reads. For context 1 query can have multiple row reads and I had very unoptimized queries, where some used to scan millions of rows to do joins per user request. CF always had free limit of 5 million but never enforced it for years. They somehow decided to enforce this like yesterday.
I did lot of query optimizations and bought my usage to few 40-50 million (from 10-20 billions) but that would still blow up my site in middle of day. They have a paid 5$ plan, but the monthly database limits were still not practically useful (30 billion a month). After spending ~2 days of engineering to optimize the queries and exploring their plans, I decided to move to my own server which is a far cheaper option. There is also per per use add on if I went with cloudflare that compulsory. But since these guys disrupted my daily job, I could not trust their pay per use model, who knows if they decide to spam me with legit looking bot traffic to get some extra $$. Plus any bad query / mistake I did could burn out monthly database limit triggering pay per use.
I am bringing this up because this will cost me dearly in coming weeks or months...
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