Game servers are among the most common DDoS targets. All it takes is an angry player, a rival server or someone who wants to “try out a booter”. The result is always the same: the server goes down and players leave. So how do you defend against it?
What a DDoS attack is
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) means a huge amount of traffic hits a server from many sources at once. The goal isn’t to “hack” the server but to overwhelm it – the link, the network gear or the game process itself.
Attacks fall roughly into two groups:
- Volumetric attacks (L3/L4) – floods of UDP/TCP packets, amplification via DNS, NTP and similar services. The goal is to saturate the link.
- Application attacks (L7) – they look like legitimate traffic: fake connections, login floods, query floods, bots. Smaller, but smarter.
Why generic protection isn’t enough for games
Many providers use generic protection designed for websites. Game traffic is different: it mostly runs over UDP, uses custom protocols and is extremely latency-sensitive. A generic filter often either misses an attack that looks like a player or, worse, drops legitimate players – so the server is “online”, but nobody can join.
Game filters: protection that understands the game
That’s why we use game filters – rules that know the protocols of specific games:
- Minecraft – checks the handshake, ping and login sequence, protection against bot attacks.
- FiveM – filtering of Cfx.re traffic, protection against connect and query floods.
- Rust – filtering of RakNet traffic and Steam queries.
- DayZ – protection for Steam queries and game UDP traffic.
The filter knows what legitimate player traffic looks like. Anything that doesn’t fit the pattern is dropped at the network edge and never reaches your server.
Why we build it ourselves
We develop our protection in-house. That has a few big advantages:
- Fast reaction – when a new attack type appears, we adjust the rules ourselves. No waiting for a vendor.
- Tuned on real traffic – we see what actually happens on our game servers and improve the filters accordingly.
- No compromises – we build protection for games, not websites.
In Poland, our primary location, we run our premium protection. In Germany, our own anti-DDoS with game filters. More on the Anti-DDoS protection page.
Always on and included
Our protection runs non-stop. There’s no “switching into attack mode” that drops players for a few seconds. And most importantly: it’s part of every plan. You don’t pay extra for it or for a “clean IP”.
What you can do yourself
Even with good protection, a few habits pay off:
- Don’t expose the IPs of other services (database, website, panel) unnecessarily.
- Use a whitelist or authentication where it makes sense.
- On Minecraft, keep
online-modeon or use a proxy with correctly configured forwarding. - Keep your server and plugins updated.
Want a server that holds up? Pick a plan – protection is included.
