Best DDoS Protected VPS Hosting in 2026

There are two things a provider can do when someone points a botnet at your server. They can scrub the attack traffic and keep you online, or they can nullroute your IP address so the attack stops reaching their network. Both get described as "DDoS protection" on pricing pages. Only one of them keeps your site up.

That distinction is the whole point of this ranking. Capacity numbers make good marketing, but the questions that actually decide whether you survive an attack are simpler: is mitigation always-on or does it kick in after you go down, does it cover the protocol your application uses, and does your provider drop you when the attack gets expensive for them?

We are CloudBlast and we are first here. Our mitigation is always-on across the whole network with up to 2.5 Tbps of scrubbing capacity, included on every plan. OVHcloud beats us on raw capacity and we say so in second place.

How to Read a DDoS Protection Claim

Scrubbing or nullrouting? Scrubbing filters attack traffic and passes the legitimate rest through, so you stay online. Nullrouting discards everything destined for your IP, attack and users alike, until the attack stops. Nullrouting protects the provider's network, not your service. Several hosts advertise it as protection.

Always-on or reactive? Always-on means traffic is already passing through mitigation before an attack starts, so the response is instant. Reactive means detection has to trigger a redirect first, which typically costs you 30 seconds to several minutes of downtime at the start of every attack.

Layer 3/4 or layer 7? Volumetric floods (SYN, UDP, amplification) are layer 3 and 4, and that is what almost every included VPS protection covers. Application-layer attacks (HTTP floods hitting your most expensive endpoint) are layer 7, and almost nothing on this list handles those. That is a reverse proxy or WAF job.

Does it cover UDP? This matters enormously for game servers, which is where most people asking about DDoS protection are coming from. Cloudflare's free tier does not proxy arbitrary UDP, so a Minecraft or FiveM server behind it is not protected at the transport layer. Cloudflare Spectrum does, and it is a paid product. Your host's own layer 4 filtering is usually the practical answer.

What is the escalation policy? Read the terms. Plenty of budget hosts include protection right up until an attack is large or sustained, at which point they nullroute you or terminate the service. That policy, not the Tbps figure, determines what happens on a bad day.

Quick Comparison

Capacity figures are as each provider publishes them, and they measure different things (network capacity, scrubbing capacity and per-instance capacity are not comparable). Treat the "always-on" and "included" columns as the meaningful ones.

1. CloudBlast

Best for: always-on scrubbing included on a €3.60 plan, with a 10 Gbps port that does not become the bottleneck during an attack.

Protection: network-wide always-on mitigation, up to 2.5 Tbps scrubbing capacity, included on every plan with no add-on.

Mitigation sits in front of the entire network rather than being provisioned per customer, so it is active from the moment your server exists. There is no toggle to enable, no per-instance fee, and no separate protected IP to order. An attack starts getting filtered before you notice it started.

The 10 Gbps port matters more here than it looks. A lot of budget hosts pair "DDoS protection" with a 200 Mbit or 1 Gbps port, which means a modest attack saturates your uplink before the scrubbing centre is even relevant. Filtering upstream of a narrow port helps less than the marketing implies.

Traffic is unmetered in Amsterdam and Salt Lake City, which matters during an attack for a reason people rarely think about until it happens: on a metered provider, attack traffic that reaches your instance can count against your allowance, so surviving the attack means paying for it. Hong Kong is capped, from 500 GB to 3 TB depending on plan.

Being straight about the limits: this is layer 3 and 4 volumetric mitigation. It handles SYN floods, UDP floods, amplification and reflection attacks. It is not a WAF, and it will not stop a well-built layer 7 HTTP flood against your login endpoint. For that you still want a reverse proxy in front. OVHcloud has considerably more raw capacity than we do.

What we like: always-on with no add-on fee, 2.5 Tbps capacity, 10 Gbps port so the uplink is not the weak link, unmetered traffic in two regions, protection on the €3.60 entry plan.

What to watch: layer 3/4 only, no WAF. Three regions. Less raw capacity than OVHcloud.

2. OVHcloud

Best for: the largest included mitigation capacity in the industry, on a network built around it.

OVHcloud's VAC (Vacuum) system is the reference implementation of included DDoS protection, and has been since the company built it in response to attacks on its own customers. It is always-on, automatic, applies to every product including the cheapest VPS, and OVHcloud publishes a network capacity above 20 Tbps with substantial headroom held in reserve above normal customer usage.

It is genuinely the best answer if raw capacity is your primary concern, and it is free. OVHcloud has absorbed some of the largest publicly documented attacks in internet history without dropping the targeted customers.

The trade-off is everything around it. Entry VPS plans run a narrow port (typically 100 Mbit to a few hundred, rising to 1 or 2 Gbps on larger plans), the control panel is dense and slow, provisioning is not instant, and there is no hourly billing on the VPS line. You are getting world-class mitigation attached to a merely adequate VPS.

What we like: 20+ Tbps network capacity, always-on and automatic, free on every product including the cheapest plans, a proven track record against very large attacks.

What to watch: low port speeds on entry plans, clunky panel, no hourly billing on VPS, support quality varies by region.

3. BuyVM

Best for: game servers on a budget, which is the use case its protection was chosen for.

BuyVM includes Path.net filtering on every plan at no extra cost, and Path.net is a specialist DDoS mitigation network rather than a generic upstream feature. That combination has made BuyVM the default recommendation in game hosting communities for years, because the filtering handles the UDP attack patterns that hit game servers and that generic protection often waves through.

Everything else about BuyVM follows the same philosophy: dedicated CPU cores rather than heavily shared ones, unmetered bandwidth, and block storage at a fraction of what the mainstream clouds charge.

The problem is buying one. BuyVM's stock is famously and persistently unavailable, and popular configurations can be out of stock for weeks. It is a small operation with a deliberately limited footprint, so if you need capacity today in a specific location, plan around disappointment.

What we like: Path.net filtering included on every plan, genuinely effective for game server traffic, dedicated cores, unmetered bandwidth, very cheap block storage.

What to watch: chronic stock shortages. Few locations. Small team, so support is best-effort. No enterprise anything.

4. Hivelocity

Best for: dedicated hardware with enterprise mitigation, when a VPS is not enough machine.

Hivelocity runs Corero's Threat Defense System across a network with 2+ Tbps of transit capacity and over a thousand direct peers. Corero is a real-time automatic mitigation platform, so protection is always-on rather than triggered after detection, and the peering density means attack traffic gets distributed across many upstreams instead of concentrating on one.

Hivelocity is primarily a bare metal and enterprise hosting company, which shapes the whole offering. Machines are more capable and more expensive than anything else on this list, provisioning is fast for the category, and support is staffed by people who can talk about your BGP session. If you are running something where an attack costs real money per minute, that is the right shape.

If you want a €4 VPS, this is not the provider.

What we like: Corero TDS with always-on mitigation, 1,000+ direct peers, strong bare metal, support that understands networking.

What to watch: priced for businesses, not individuals. Overkill for a small VPS workload. Less transparent public pricing than the self-serve clouds.

5. Hetzner Cloud

Best for: competent included filtering alongside the best API in European hosting.

Hetzner runs Arbor and Juniper hardware for DDoS mitigation, included automatically on every server with nothing to enable. It scrubs the standard volumetric patterns: DNS and NTP reflection, UDP floods, SYN floods, DNS floods and malformed packets. For a web application facing ordinary internet background noise, that is entirely sufficient.

It is deliberately conservative rather than headline-grabbing. Hetzner does not publish a capacity figure and does not market itself on DDoS protection. The filtering exists, it works for common attack types, and the company would rather talk about the API and the price.

Speaking of which: the 15 June 2026 price adjustment raised CX and CAX plans roughly 1.3x to 1.4x and CPX and CCX by 2.1x to 3.1x, so the value calculation is different from a year ago.

What we like: included and automatic, real Arbor and Juniper hardware, covers common volumetric patterns, excellent API and Terraform provider.

What to watch: no published capacity figures. Filtering is tuned for general workloads rather than game servers. The June 2026 price increase.

6. Vultr

Best for: adding mitigation to a specific instance in a specific city, and paying only for that instance.

Vultr's DDoS Protection is an optional feature at $10/mo per instance, adding 10 Gbps of mitigation capacity to that instance, available across Vultr locations. Once enabled it is always-on for that instance.

The per-instance model is the interesting part. If you run twenty servers and only the public-facing load balancer needs protection, you pay for one. On providers that bundle protection network-wide, everyone pays for it in the base price whether they need it or not. For a fleet with a small attack surface, Vultr's approach can work out cheaper.

For a single small VPS it is the opposite. Adding $10/mo to a $6 Droplet-equivalent nearly triples the bill for something CloudBlast, OVHcloud, Hetzner and BuyVM all include for free.

What we like: pay only for the instances that need it, 10 Gbps per protected instance, available across the location list, always-on once enabled.

What to watch: $10/mo per instance is expensive on small servers. Unprotected by default, so it is easy to forget. 10 Gbps is modest against a large attack.

7. Scaleway

Best for: included Arbor-based filtering with EU sovereignty and a proper cloud API.

Scaleway includes Arbor-based DDoS mitigation on its instances at no additional charge. Arbor is industry-standard equipment and the implementation is competent, though like Hetzner, Scaleway does not publish capacity numbers or market heavily on it.

The reasons to pick Scaleway remain what they were: French ownership for EU sovereignty requirements, two Amsterdam availability zones plus French and Polish regions, per-hour billing on every resource, and a genuinely good Terraform provider. DDoS protection is a competent default rather than the reason to choose them.

Remember that per-hour billing applies to flexible IPs and snapshots too, which makes the total bill hard to forecast.

What we like: included Arbor filtering, EU sovereignty, per-hour billing across the stack, strong API and Terraform support.

What to watch: no published mitigation capacity. Bill is hard to predict. Support is a paid tier. Stock can be tight in popular zones.

8. Cherry Servers

Best for: bare metal and dedicated cloud in Europe with network-level filtering included.

Cherry Servers includes network-level DDoS filtering across its infrastructure and sits in the same category as Hivelocity: dedicated hardware and dedicated cloud rather than cheap shared VPS. Its European footprint (Lithuania and the Netherlands) with hourly-billed bare metal is an unusual combination, since most bare metal is sold on monthly or longer commitments.

If your requirement is a protected dedicated machine in the EU that you can turn off when you are done with it, Cherry Servers covers a gap most of this list does not.

Their published detail on mitigation specifics is thinner than OVHcloud's or Hivelocity's, so if you have a hard capacity requirement, ask before you buy rather than assuming.

What we like: hourly-billed bare metal, EU locations, included network filtering, good API for the category.

What to watch: limited public detail on mitigation capacity. Smaller footprint. Priced above shared VPS.

9. GreenCloud

Best for: cheap VPS in unusual locations, with filtering available in some of them.

GreenCloud runs over thirty locations including Asian cities that most Western providers skip entirely, such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Hanoi. DDoS filtering is available but varies by location and plan rather than being a uniform network-wide guarantee, so the specific node you pick determines what you get.

That inconsistency is why it ranks here rather than higher. GreenCloud's appeal is price and geographic coverage. If protection is a hard requirement, verify it is available in the exact location you want before ordering, and do not assume the filtering on their Tokyo node describes their Amsterdam one.

What we like: 30+ locations including hard-to-find Asian cities, very cheap, responsive support for the price tier, filtering available in many locations.

What to watch: protection varies by location, so check before ordering. Budget infrastructure with the expectations that implies. Limited published mitigation detail.

10. Contabo

Best for: nothing on this list, and it is here as a warning rather than a recommendation.

Contabo is genuinely excellent value. Cloud VPS 10 gives you 3 vCPU, 8 GB of RAM and 75 GB of NVMe for $4.95/mo, nobody beats that, and they do not raise the price at renewal. On the specific question this article asks, however, their answer is nullrouting the attacked IP address.

That is worth being precise about, because "Anti-DDoS" appears in their marketing. Nullrouting means that when an attack starts, traffic to your IP is discarded at the network edge. The attack stops reaching Contabo, which is the point of it, and your service is completely offline for the duration. From your users' perspective the attack succeeded.

For a staging environment, a backup target or an internal tool, that is a perfectly reasonable trade for the price. For anything public-facing that someone might target, it means you have no protection in any sense that matters, and you should either put a proxy in front or host it somewhere else. The standard 200 Mbit port compounds this, since a small attack saturates the link regardless.

What we like: unbeatable RAM and storage per euro, no renewal increase, free IPv4, wide location list.

What to watch: protection is IP nullrouting, so an attack takes you offline. 200 Mbit port. Variable I/O. Email-only support with slow responses.

What Included Protection Will Not Do For You

Even the best entry on this list leaves gaps. Know which ones you own.

Layer 7 attacks. A few thousand requests per second against your search endpoint or login form is not a volumetric attack and no amount of scrubbing capacity sees it as hostile. The traffic is well-formed, it just costs you a database query each. This needs rate limiting, caching and a WAF, and it is your job, not your host's.

Application misconfiguration. An open DNS resolver, an exposed Memcached instance or an unauthenticated API endpoint will get you into trouble no matter what sits upstream. Providers filter attacks aimed at you, not attacks launched from you, and being the reflector in someone else's amplification attack usually gets your service suspended.

Attacks that come from inside the perimeter. If your attacker is another tenant in the same data centre, traffic may never traverse the scrubbing centre at all.

Sustained low-volume attrition. A slowloris-style attack holding thousands of connections open uses almost no bandwidth. Volumetric mitigation does not trigger, and your connection pool exhausts anyway.

The escalation clause. Read the AUP before you need it. Many providers, including some ranked above, reserve the right to nullroute or terminate a customer whose traffic threatens the wider network. Included protection is included until it is not.

Matching Protection to What You Run

Game servers (Minecraft, FiveM, Rust, CS2). You need layer 4 filtering that handles UDP, and generic web-oriented protection often does not. BuyVM with Path.net is the community default for good reason. CloudBlast and OVHcloud both filter UDP floods at the network level. Cloudflare's free tier does not proxy arbitrary UDP, so it is not the answer here.

Public web applications. Volumetric mitigation from your host plus a reverse proxy or CDN for layer 7 is the standard pairing, and each covers what the other misses. CloudBlast, OVHcloud or Hetzner underneath, Cloudflare or similar in front.

APIs and SaaS backends. Always-on mitigation matters more than peak capacity, because a reactive setup's 30 to 300 second detection window is an outage your customers will notice. Prioritise the always-on column above the Tbps column.

High-value targets (crypto, gambling, competitive gaming, anything with motivated adversaries). Buy real capacity and support that answers the phone. OVHcloud for included scale, Hivelocity if you want an engineer on the other end.

Personal projects and internal tools. Anything on this list works, including Contabo. Nobody is attacking your Grafana instance.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Verdict

CloudBlast for always-on 2.5 Tbps scrubbing included on every plan from €3.60, with a 10 Gbps port so the uplink is not the weak point. OVHcloud if raw included capacity is the priority and you can live with the VPS around it. BuyVM for game servers, if you can find one in stock. Hivelocity if downtime costs enough to justify enterprise hardware and engineers. Vultr if you need protection on a few instances out of many. Contabo only where going offline during an attack is genuinely acceptable.

The one rule worth remembering: ask whether they scrub or nullroute. Everything else on the pricing page is secondary to that answer.