You keep calling it an attack. This was normal (growing) traffic for the site.
From the comments on the site:
"I didn't notice any "attack" when CloudFlare began to route all traffic directly to us. It looked like normal web traffic - much of it, but no more than usual."
He said; she said. A Layer 7 attack is not necessarily something one might "notice." The very nature of such an attack is "normal" looking. I think it's impossible for us to say who is right -- OP or CloudFlare -- without substantial hard-data. Ultimately, it's not the basis of the article, and the OP is looking for a different service -- unmanaged, limited-downlink bandwidth -- than what CloudFlare is looking to provide -- managed, edge network.
Irregardless if it's an attack or not, CloudFlare's personell did not handle this well.
Yes, I know they did offer one hell of a starter/"sweet lolipop to sucker you in" pack - but that's still not what's being discussed.
It has been re-iterated many times in this thread - but CloudFlare had a sane person on the other end that was willing to open his wallet - that's something one should act on quickly.
keep in mind that the author's words are... his words. Perhaps he's not putting out the full story? How can you know which side is "right" on an issue such as this?
All we know is that the author ran on the free plan, and probably should have upgraded from the free plan when he started seeing his site getting large amounts of traffic.
In the end all is well, he got another service that served his purposes.
From the comments on the site: "I didn't notice any "attack" when CloudFlare began to route all traffic directly to us. It looked like normal web traffic - much of it, but no more than usual."