Looking for cheap DDoS protection without cutting corners on security? Before diving into the full breakdown, here’s a quick comparison of every service covered in this guide so you can find your fit at a glance.
|
Provider |
Free Tier |
Starting Price |
Layer 7 Support |
Mitigation Capacity |
Best For |
|
Cloudflare |
Yes |
$0 / $25 per month (Pro) |
Yes (WAF on Pro+) |
Unmetered (all plans) |
Websites, blogs, small businesses |
|
Sucuri |
No |
~$17/month (billed annually) |
Yes (WAF included) |
Not publicly disclosed |
WordPress sites, bundled malware scanning |
|
Path.net |
No |
Custom quote |
Yes |
Multi-Tbps network |
Game servers (Minecraft, Rust, FiveM) |
|
Hetzner |
Included with hosting |
~$5/month (VPS) |
Limited |
~1 Tbps upstream filtering |
Developers, self-hosted projects |
|
OVHcloud |
Included with hosting |
~€4/month |
Limited |
17+ Tbps (VAC system) |
EU businesses, GDPR-compliant hosting |
|
Voxility |
No |
Custom quote |
Yes |
Multi-Tbps BGP network |
Agencies, hosting resellers |
Now for the full breakdown, including what actually separates these services in real use. If you also want to see how enterprise-grade and developer-focused tools compare, our full roundup of the best DDoS protection tools in 2026 covers those in more detail.
First, What Actually Happens During a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is when someone floods your server with so much fake traffic that it chokes. Real visitors can’t get through because junk requests are eating up all the bandwidth. Picture a restaurant where a hundred people walk in, order nothing, sit at every table, and refuse to leave. Your actual customers are stuck at the door. If you’re entirely new to the topic, our beginner’s guide to DDoS attacks explains the mechanics in plain language before you dive into protection options.
Attacks vary in how they’re delivered. Some are pure-volume raw traffic designed to saturate your connection. Others are more surgical, targeting specific parts of a web application to break functionality without needing as much firepower. The latter are harder to catch, and cheaper services often miss them, which is worth knowing before you commit to anything.
Most attacks don’t last days. Many are over in under an hour. But even 20 minutes of downtime during peak traffic can mean lost sales, frustrated users, and a dented reputation. CISA’s official guidance on denial-of-service attacks recommends layered defenses, traffic filtering, and continuous monitoring to reduce downtime during active attacks.
What to Actually Look For (Without Getting Lost in Marketing)
DDoS protection services are good at making their feature lists sound impressive. Here’s what actually matters when you’re working with a limited budget:
- Mitigation capacity is the big one. Measured in gigabits or terabits per second, it tells you how large an attack the service can absorb. Some cheap plans cap this capacity quite low. If a provider doesn’t list the limit clearly, that’s already a warning sign.
- Detection speed matters more than most people realize. A service that takes two minutes to detect and reroute traffic will let real damage through before it does anything useful. Please look for sub-30-second response times if the spec sheet mentions them.
- Always-on versus on-demand is a practical tradeoff. Always-on means traffic is constantly being filtered. On-demand kicks in only after an attack is already detected. Always-on is more reliable but usually costs more. For anything business-critical, it’s worth the effort.
- Layer coverage specifically, whether a service handles both Layer 3/4 (raw traffic floods) and Layer 7 (application layer attacks), makes a bigger difference than price alone.
OWASP’s Denial of Service cheat sheet highlights why application-layer attacks are increasingly difficult to mitigate compared to traditional volumetric floods. A service that only blocks volume won’t help if someone’s hammering your login page with automated bot requests.
The Budget Picks That Are Actually Worth It
Cloudflare: Free to $25/Month
Cloudflare is the obvious starting point, and for good reason. Their free plan includes DDoS protection that legitimately outperforms what some paid services charge real money for. For a blog, portfolio, or small business site, the free tier handles the vast majority of realistic attack scenarios.
The Pro plan at $25/month adds a web application firewall, faster response infrastructure, and more detailed analytics. Cloudflare’s network is enormous; they’ve absorbed some of the largest recorded DDoS attacks ever measured, which gives you a sense of the headroom available even on lower tiers.
Setup: Point your domain’s DNS nameservers to Cloudflare, enable DDoS protection in the dashboard, and you’re done. No server-side configuration required. The entire process takes about 20 minutes.
Honest caveat: Cloudflare’s free plan doesn’t include a WAF. Layer 7 application attacks (bot-driven login abuse, scraping, API flooding) will get through unless you’re on Pro or higher. For a basic blog, that’s fine. For a site that handles logins or checkout flows, budget for Pro. If you’re also considering AWS Shield as an alternative, our Cloudflare vs AWS Shield comparison breaks down exactly how they differ in pricing and attack handling.
Sucuri: Around $17/Month (Billed Annually)
Sucuri is a name you’ll hear constantly in WordPress security discussions, but their protection works across any CMS. Their basic firewall plan runs about $199/year, roughly $17 per month, which is reasonable given that DDoS protection, malware scanning, and a WAF are all bundled together.
For a small business owner who doesn’t want to manage three separate security tools, this setup genuinely works. It’s not the most powerful mitigation option on this list in terms of raw capacity, but it’s consistent. Their support team is notably responsive, which matters more than people admit when something breaks at 2am.
Best for: Site owners who want an all-in-one security layer and don’t want to configure separate services.
Path.net: Custom Pricing, Built for Gaming
Path.net has earned a strong reputation specifically in the game server space. If you’re running FiveM, Minecraft, Rust, CS2, or anything similar and getting targeted regularly, this name comes up in nearly every serious community discussion on the topic.
Their infrastructure is purpose-built to handle the kind of relentless, sustained, high-frequency attacks that game servers attract—patterns that generic DDoS services are often tuned poorly to handle. Pricing is custom depending on your traffic profile, but smaller server operators have found workable entry-level rates. Worth reaching out directly for a quote if this specific use case applies to you.
Best for: Game server operators who regularly experience attacks and need purpose-built mitigation rather than a generic web proxy.
Hetzner: From ~$5/Month With Built-In Protection
Hetzner is a German VPS and dedicated server provider that includes upstream DDoS filtering across all plans at no extra charge. You’re not paying a premium for protection; it comes standard with every server.
It won’t stop sophisticated application-layer attacks on its own, but for volumetric floods it holds up well. A setup many developers use: run the actual server on Hetzner and put Cloudflare in front of it as the public-facing layer. Between the two, you get solid coverage for under $10/month combined.
Important note: Keep your Hetzner server’s real IP private. If an attacker discovers it through old DNS records, email headers, or a forum post, they can bypass Cloudflare entirely and hit the origin directly. Set your Hetzner firewall to only accept traffic from Cloudflare’s IP ranges.
Best for: Developers and self-hosters who want solid base protection without paying extra for it.
OVHcloud: Included Free With Hosting Plans
OVHcloud runs what they call their VAC (Vacuum) anti-DDoS system across all of their infrastructure: dedicated servers, VPS, and shared hosting. It’s not a checkbox on a marketing page; their mitigation capacity handles multiple terabits per second of attack traffic and has been battle-tested over many years.
Automatic detection typically kicks in within seconds of spotting abnormal traffic patterns. For EU-based businesses that also need GDPR-compliant hosting, OVHcloud checks multiple boxes at once. Hosting starts around €4/month with protection already built in.
Best for: EU-based businesses that want GDPR compliance and DDoS protection in one hosting package.
Voxility: Good for Agencies and Hosting Resellers
Voxility operates its own BGP network and offers DDoS protection that scales from smaller sites to high-demand infrastructure. They’re particularly well-suited for agencies or hosting resellers managing multiple client properties under one roof. Pricing is competitive compared to enterprise-tier alternatives, and the protection is genuinely solid. Request a quote if you’re managing more than one property.
Best for: Agencies, resellers, and infrastructure operators managing multiple domains or client properties.
A Few Things That Make a Bigger Difference Than People Expect
Keep your origin IP private. This is the most overlooked detail. If an attacker finds your real server IP through old DNS records, email headers, or any public source, they can attack you directly and bypass all your protection. Tools like SecurityTrails can reveal what your IP history looks like to the public. Treat your origin IP like a password.
Enable rate limiting. Most protection dashboards let you cap how many requests a single IP can send per minute. Enabling this costs nothing and quietly filters out a large volume of automated garbage before it becomes a real problem. Even Cloudflare’s free plan includes basic rate limiting under the WAF rules.
Set up uptime monitoring. You can’t respond to something you don’t know is happening. A simple alert that pings you within 60 seconds of downtime is worth setting up regardless of what protection you have in place. UptimeRobot’s free tier checks every 5 minutes; Better Uptime offers 30-second intervals on paid plans.
Layer your defenses. Using Cloudflare in front of an OVHcloud or Hetzner server is not redundant; instead, it serves as a complementary service. OVHcloud absorbs volumetric floods at the network layer before they reach your server. Cloudflare filters web-layer traffic, caches content, and applies WAF rules. They cover different threat vectors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cloudflare’s free plan is the honest answer for most people. It’s backed by one of the largest networks on the internet and handles the majority of real-world attack scenarios at zero cost. For sites handling transactions or logins, $25/month for the Pro plan is the next step.
Yes. OVHcloud and Hetzner both include DDoS protection as part of their base hosting costs. If attackers are targeting your server aggressively and generic mitigation isn’t keeping up, Path.net is the more specialized and more effective choice for game server traffic.
It depends entirely on the provider. The services on this list are all well-regarded and proven in real-world use. Price isn’t a reliable indicator of quality on its own; some budget options genuinely perform well, while some mid-range services disappoint. Check what attack types and capacity tiers you cover before committing.
Layer 3 and 4 protection handles volumetric attacks, floods of raw traffic designed to saturate your connection. Layer 7 deals with application-level attacks that target specific functions of your site, like login pages, search endpoints, or checkout flows. Modern attacks increasingly happen at Layer 7 because it requires far less traffic volume to cause disruption, making it harder to detect and block. Coverage at both levels matters.
Adding Cloudflare on top is still worth doing, even if your host provides protection. Hosting-level protection typically handles volumetric floods at the network edge. Cloudflare adds application-layer filtering, a CDN, and WAF rules that your host’s protection won’t cover. Using Cloudflare’s free plan adds zero cost while meaningfully improving your overall posture.
Sudden unexplained slowdowns, a traffic spike from unusual geographic locations, maxed-out server CPU or bandwidth, and an inability to load your site are the main signs. A monitoring tool with basic traffic dashboards or even a simple uptime alert makes these patterns much easier to spot in real time. Your hosting control panel’s bandwidth graphs are a good first place to check.
With reputable services, the opposite is often true. Cloudflare in particular frequently makes sites load faster because of caching and CDN delivery. The filtering layer adds negligible latency under normal conditions. The protection benefits far outweigh any tradeoff in speed.
Where to Start If You’re Still Unsure
Start with Cloudflare’s free plan. Point your domain’s DNS nameservers to Cloudflare and enable DDoS protection in the dashboard, and you will be covered for the most common attack types. It takes about 20 minutes and costs nothing.
From there, build in layers as your needs grow. Run your server on Hetzner or OVHcloud for base network-layer protection, add Sucuri if you want bundled malware scanning, and look at Path.net if your game server keeps getting hit despite standard protection. The goal isn’t to find one perfect tool; it’s to stack a few smart, affordable ones so there’s no obvious gap for an attacker to exploit. For a broader prevention checklist, our guide on how to prevent DDoS attacks covers the full picture beyond just choosing a service.
You don’t need a large security budget. You just need to be less exposed than the next person who didn’t bother.
