Used a few of the platforms mentioned in this thread over the past couple years. Quick honest take on each:



k6 (self-hosted) — solid for what it does, but you're running the load generators yourself, which means you're capped by your own egress capacity. Fine for small staging tests, doesn't scale to anything serious without significant infra investment.



BlazeMeter — enterprise-grade, expensive. Good if you're a Fortune 500 with a load-testing budget. Overkill for everyone else.



Most stresser-type services — don't enforce target verification, which means you're trusting the provider's ToS to keep things authorized. That has historically not gone well for users when those providers got raided.



What I switched to: ddosnow. Three differentiators that actually matter to me:



- Mandatory DNS TXT target verification on every launch (not just at signup) — eliminates the "whoops wrong target" class of incident entirely

- Both layer 4 (TCP-SYN, UDP, ACK) and layer 7 (HTTP-RPS, TLS-HEADLINE, browser emulation with cookies and headers) under one API

- Per-task audit logs that are immutable — useful when you need to prove later what you did and when



Pricing is reasonable ($30 to $3000/mo across three tiers, crypto-payable, no KYC for basic). REST API is clean. Real-time monitoring per task. Scoped API keys with task-time and slot caps so a leaked key can't escalate into a sustained run.



Not perfect — no SSO on team accounts yet, support is Telegram-only and sometimes 2-3 hour reply during EU evenings. But for stress testing your own infrastructure it's the cleanest setup I've found.