Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > Staminus DDoS Protection 11 Month Review
Staminus DDoS Protection 11 Month Review
| Posted by UberTricep, 10-09-2014, 07:35 AM |
| I have been using a Staminus enterprise plan to protect servers from various kinds of DDoS attacks for 11 months. Overall, it has been an awful experience and I do not recommend Staminus at all. I have previously wrote a review, but now I have been with them for a much longer period of time, my points here are more valid.
Setup was fast and prompt. However, one of the first attacks wasn't mitigated and everything went offline. Then for over a month customers complained of slowness and packet loss. It took over a month before Arad was able to fix this problem. They did credit me a free month because of this.
Intermittent disconnectivity: every now and then traffic would just drop for a few minutes at a time, this happens several times a week on some occasions.
HTTP Floods. Apache logs clearly show GET floods from Staminus IPs. But the attacks aren't being mitigated. Upon sending them a ticket, TonyL said he doesn't see any attack which is complete BS. Everything is offline, servers are overloading and the Staminus mitigation isn't working, and that's all they have to say.
False positives: for good few months we had a high number of false positives. We lost many customers over this, tickets would come in from customers saying they can't access our service and would request refunds.
Connection problems between Staminus proxy and the backend datacentre. We were limited to about 1mbps upload from the datacentre because there were some packetloss. Customers complained about everything being slow. It wasn't possible to blame either Staminus or the datacentre but still highly annoying. The problem fixed itself after about a week.
They changed some of the protection rules but didn't fully test it to make sure it was working. The result was a 7 hour outage. Monitoring didn't alert anyone because HTTP 200 status was still being returned.
I'm just looking at the ticket history with Staminus, so many tickets complaining of packet loss, outages and false positives.
Staminus are one of the cheapest providers for DDoS mitigation. I guess you always get what you pay for. If you're going to choose Staminus, its going to be a real battle to keep everything online. They really do not seem to understand the importance of uptime. I do not see how they claim they are the #1 DDoS mitigation provider. That is a huge and bold claim, but in my case they cannot back this up because it has been a never ending road of problems and I suspect this will continue unless I switch providers.
One good thing is their customer support ticket responses are very quick, even though they are sometimes useless.
Staminus employees: I know you lurk around in these forums, if you want to lookup my account, one of my tickets is #109779, if you look up my tickets you will see the above are very accurate statements of my experiences.
|
| Posted by TQ Mark, 11-18-2014, 09:07 AM |
| Thanks for posting your experience.
Did you switch to a new DDOS protection provider? If so, how do they compare to Staminus?
What types of services are you running that need protection?
|
| Posted by Infinitnet, 11-18-2014, 09:36 AM |
| Interesting review. On WHT and in general I have only heard good things about Staminus and everyone is praising them. I have to say that I've never been using Staminus directly, but I've had a small box with BuyVM a while back as an SMTP server and they use Staminus for the PoP I've been using. Apart from random packet loss basically every few hours, I've also often had TCP connection issues, where the client was unable to complete a TCP handshake through their filtering randomly but also every single day. @DeltaAnime tried his best to solve this problem with the help of Staminus, but unsuccessfully. A few weeks later I started monitoring TCP services on Staminus' Amsterdam and LA network and it's been the same - every second hour there was packet loss and almost every hour a TCP handshake failed, even though I asked them to whitelist the IP of the monitoring system first, which they confirmed they did twice. Cause of these issues I stopped using a box filtered through their network as a backup SMTP, but up until now I thought it would probably have been just me, because Staminus said that there wasn't any problem with their network or filtering and @DeltaAnime said that his clients using the Staminus filtering haven't reported such problems either. Long story short, I'm kinda glad that this review in a way confirms that I'm not crazy and that at least some people indeed experience similar issues with their filtering/network.
This just reflects my personal opinion and experience, Staminus seem to work good for most people and I surely don't want to make them bad or anything. The communication with them has been great and their costs are hard to compete with as well.
@TQ Mark, I like your post count.
|
| Posted by DeltaAnime, 11-18-2014, 09:51 AM |
| A lot of our issues at Staminus were because we requested them to put anal retentive rulesets in place. We had an overly tight ruleset in Las Vegas that was causing our IRC server to completely brick itself every couple hours and dump a bunch of users. After talking to Staminus, reset our rules to a "control group" we've come up with and now I can stay connected for weeks at a time.
I've never had them try to do layer 7 HTTP protection since I just do that myself for customers. Far as I can tell they prefer to do that localized with some extra assistance.
Their support is top notch. They've been helping me debug an issue with our BGP session that ended up not even being related to them, and yet they helped debug it.
Best of luck on everything
Francisco
|
| Posted by kipper3d, 11-18-2014, 09:31 PM |
| It is typically true that with ddos you get what you pay for, especially with companies that don't provide individual filtering based on your traffic needs. However, skilled users tend to get the most out of any ddos solutions on the market due to their ability to mitigate what the big filters misses. Not a whole lot you can do with false positives but that happens when filtering is trying to accommodate both web and game traffic for everyone on the network.
|
| Posted by TQ Mark, 11-18-2014, 09:50 PM |
| Since this thread is about Staminus, are you suggesting that they do not provide filtering based on their customer's individual traffic needs?
|
| Posted by DeltaAnime, 11-18-2014, 10:49 PM |
| That's untrue, they've done lots of very specific rulesets that users have asked for. If you have a lot of IP's it's possible you'll run out of custom firewall rules, but those are quite affordable to add more.
Francisco
|
| Posted by kipper3d, 11-18-2014, 10:55 PM |
| I've heard good things about Staminus. I was only pointing out in general, where ddos protection is provided cheaply usually doesn't include for a knowledgable staff to tweak filtering for each customer it provides service to. Generally hard to find people who can read pcap dumps and make adjustments accordingly.
|
Add to Favourites 
Print this Article
Also Read
Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting
