Game servers are among the most attacked machines on the internet. Rival community raids, grudge matches, and extortion attempts target game ports because even a 15-minute outage kills a raid night and empties a Discord. Attacks on game servers routinely measure 10-100 Gbps, with larger community servers seeing 300 Gbps+ floods during disputes. Protecting a dedicated game server is a two-layer job: the host’s network-level mitigation handles volumetric traffic, and your own configuration handles everything that reaches the machine. This article explains what providers actually include and what you still have to do yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you shop for a host, start by using our comparison table to compare dedicated server providers<\/a>, then ask each candidate the questions in the final section below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hosting-level protection is delivered at the network edge, before traffic reaches your CPU. The standard layers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The critical difference between plans is whether mitigation is always-on or on-demand, and what the null-route threshold is. A host that null-routes your IP at 5 Gbps is not protecting you – it is protecting its network at your expense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Expect to pay for the good stuff: always-on protection on a DDoS-protected IP range typically adds 5-20 USD per month on mid-range plans, and some providers include it only on their higher tiers. A plan priced well below market is often carrying no real mitigation – the provider simply null-routes attacks and lets you deal with the fallout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Always-on filtering inspects every packet, which adds a small amount of latency but means attacks are absorbed the moment they start. On-demand mitigation only kicks in after detection and rerouting, which can take 1-5 minutes – an eternity during a coordinated raid. For game servers, always-on L3\/L4 protection is the baseline you want; on-demand is only acceptable for low-priority web workloads. Confirm the detection-to-mitigation time in writing and check whether clean traffic is rate-limited after scrubbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a sustained campaign – the kind that follows a public dispute – even the best edge filtering can struggle when the attacker rotates vectors. A good provider will raise your mitigation ceiling on request, apply custom rules for the specific game ports, and share post-incident reports showing what was dropped and what reached the server. If a provider cannot produce such reports, its mitigation is likely automated with no human escalation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Host-level mitigation stops floods, but application-level abuse reaches your box. Close every port except the game’s, enforce rate limits, and harden the kernel:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Add fail2ban or an equivalent for repeated failed logins, restrict RCON and SSH to your own IP range, and never expose admin ports to the public internet. If a host offers a proxy or reverse-proxy IP for the game, use it – it hides the origin IP, which is the single most effective thing you can do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rate limiting on the query port deserves special attention: game query protocols answer single small packets, which makes them trivially cheap to flood. A simple rule that caps new connections per source IP per second keeps a query flood from exhausting the server process while legitimate players are unaffected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Game servers attract attack types that web servers rarely see: UDP amplification (NTP, DNS, memcached) that multiplies small spoofed requests into massive floods, query floods that spam the server’s status\/query port, and connection floods that exhaust the accept queue. Keep only the ports your game actually needs open:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask five questions before paying: Is mitigation always-on and included, or an upsell? What is the null-route threshold, and how fast is un-null-routing? Where are the scrubbing centers relative to the server location? Is the game’s query port protected against application floods, or only L3\/L4? And what happened in their last real attack on a similar customer – they should be able to show you. Once you have answers, see the full specs and pricing<\/a> across providers and weigh mitigation quality equally with hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, check the host’s history with game servers specifically. Providers that advertise DDoS protection for web hosting often have little experience with UDP game traffic, which behaves differently from HTTP. Ask how they handle UDP reflection attacks and whether their filtering is protocol-aware for the game you run.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhat Hosts Typically Include in DDoS Protection<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Layer<\/th> What it stops<\/th> Typical capacity<\/th><\/tr><\/thead> L3\/L4 filtering<\/td> Volumetric floods, UDP\/ICMP floods, SYN floods<\/td> 100 Gbps – 2+ Tbps<\/td><\/tr> Scrubbing centers<\/td> Attack traffic rerouted, cleaned, returned<\/td> Depends on provider<\/td><\/tr> L7 inspection<\/td> Application floods (game query spam, HTTP floods)<\/td> Rule-based<\/td><\/tr> Null-route policy<\/td> Last-resort drop of the target IP<\/td> N\/A – avoid plans that null-route early<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Always-On vs On-Demand Mitigation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What You Still Need to Configure Yourself<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
# nftables: allow only the game port, drop the rest\nnft add rule inet filter input tcp dport 25565 accept\nnft add rule inet filter input udp dport 8211 accept\nnft add rule inet filter input drop\n\n# sysctl hardening for SYN floods\nsysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies=1\nsysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter=1<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nAttack Vectors Specific to Game Servers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Game<\/th> Default ports<\/th> Protocol<\/th><\/tr><\/thead> Minecraft<\/td> 25565<\/td> TCP<\/td><\/tr> Palworld<\/td> 8211<\/td> UDP<\/td><\/tr> CS2<\/td> 27015<\/td> UDP + TCP<\/td><\/tr> ARK: Survival Ascended<\/td> 7777<\/td> UDP<\/td><\/tr> Valheim<\/td> 2456<\/td> UDP<\/td><\/tr> Rust<\/td> 28015<\/td> UDP<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n How to Evaluate a Host’s DDoS Offer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n