An utterly disappointing experience with DDoS mitigation. A few months back, we started using Psychz for our DDoS protection through a GRE tunnel. Their new Chicago PoP was particularly attractive because they were offering a decent blend and good capacity from the start, and they were offering us a good price.
Things started off well enough. We paid them for a few hours of their network admins' time just to make sure the setup was done properly. Unfortunately, this was only the start of a number of problems that caused massive quality of service issues for our customers as we deployed the new solution. Essentially, inbound traffic would be served to our full-time mitigated customers through a Psychz GRE tunnel from their Chicago PoP. We expected some overhead going in, and lower speeds than a cross-connect or direct peering, but what we got out of it was entirely ridiculous.
Long story short, we were only able to download ~30Mbps through the Psychz Chicago GRE tunnel. Not MB/s, but Mbps - which equates to about 3.7MB/s of actual download speeds through a GRE tunnel purportedly capable of 1Gbps. After weeks of back and forth discussions with staff at all levels of the company, including a personal Skype group with senior management, we weren't able to get anywhere. At one point, one of the managers admitted to giving us false promises on their attempted fixes - in essence, admitting to lying to us. It's also worth mentioning that the ticket staff were entirely worthless - the clearly outsourced support, assuming they ever responded at all, were perhaps the most generic and canned we've ever dealt with.
We eventually gave up and set up a GRE tunnel through USDedicated as a temporary solution. This was much better - we're able to push 600-700Mbps through their tunnel without any issues to speak of; much closer to the realistic overhead of a modern GRE tunnel. Because of this, and because of certain information we received from a third party, we can only assume that their newer PoPs are using substandard older-generation hardware to serve GRE tunnels.
I sincerely wish we had a better experience with Psychz. I think colocating or renting from them directly is probably a better overall play. But our experience using them as a third party, but closely located, mitigation provider was an - excuse the pun -unmitigated disaster.
I believe Psychz is growing and expanding far too fast for their own good. I wish they would focus more of their time and effort on making their current PoPs fantastic instead of offering service in every possible corner of the globe at rock-bottom pricing and, according to our experience, rock-bottom quality.
I want to be clear. I want companies like Pscyhz to do well. Mitigation is largely lacking, especially in locations that are relatively underserved like Chicago or Sao Paulo or Singapore, etc. I just wish they would do it a little better.
