Best DDoS-Protected VPS Hosting: 7 Providers, Real Capacity Numbers

There is a specific way that “DDoS protected” hosting fails you, and it’s worth understanding before you compare a single price.

You get attacked. Your host detects the flood. And then, to protect their network and their other customers, they null-route your IP address — they tell the internet to discard all traffic to you, attack and legitimate alike. Your server is now unreachable for the next two to twenty-four hours.

That is not protection. That is the attacker’s goal, achieved by your hosting provider on the attacker’s behalf. And it is what a meaningful share of “DDoS protected VPS” plans actually do.

So this comparison uses one qualification rule: always-on layer 3/4 scrubbing, included at no extra cost, with a published mitigation capacity. A provider that can’t tell you how many gigabits they can absorb is a provider that hasn’t told you what happens when you exceed it.

The quick answer

Checked August 2026.

Two numbers in that table deserve to be read next to each other. OVHcloud includes 1.3 Tbps of always-on mitigation at no cost. Vultr sells 10 Gbps as a $10/month add-on. That’s roughly 130 times less capacity, for money instead of free. Both are legitimate businesses making different bets — but if your actual concern is staying online during a volumetric attack, the gap is not subtle.

The distinction that decides whether any of this helps you

Almost every provider on this list protects layers 3 and 4. Almost none protect layer 7. If you don’t know which one you’re worried about, you can buy exactly the wrong thing.

Layer 3/4 attacks are volumetric. SYN floods, UDP amplification, reflection attacks — raw traffic, measured in gigabits or terabits per second, designed to saturate your network link. You cannot defend against these on your own server; by the time packets reach your VPS, the link is already full. This is what upstream scrubbing solves, and it’s what “DDoS protected VPS” almost always means.

Layer 7 attacks are application-level. Thousands of requests per second to your most expensive endpoint — a search query, a login, a checkout. The traffic volume may be trivial, a few megabits. Your network link is fine. Your database is on fire. Network-level scrubbing does not see anything wrong with these requests, because individually there isn’t.

This matters because layer 7 attacks are now the common case for ordinary websites, and the protection bundled with your VPS does nothing about them. If you’re running a web application, the realistic answer is a VPS with good L3/4 protection plus Cloudflare or a similar reverse proxy in front of your application. That combination costs nothing extra on Cloudflare’s free tier and covers both categories.

Cloudways is the one provider here that bundles both, because its stack routes through Cloudflare by default.

Also check: does being attacked get you suspended?

Read the acceptable use policy before you buy, and search it for the words “null route”, “blackhole” and “suspend”. Some providers reserve the right to disable your server if attacks against you affect their network — meaning the attack succeeds and you may also lose your service. Providers with real scrubbing capacity don’t need that clause because they can absorb the traffic instead.

And if you run game servers, ask specifically about UDP

Most scrubbing infrastructure is tuned for TCP and web traffic. Game protocols run on UDP, look superficially like attack traffic, and are frequently mangled or dropped by generic filters — protection that breaks your game is not protection. Game hosting specialists run rulesets tuned for specific titles. If you’re hosting Minecraft, Rust or similar, buy from someone who names your game — our Minecraft server hosting comparison covers providers that do.

The providers

1. Hostinger — cheapest way to get protection included

Hostinger includes free Wanguard-based DDoS filtering on every VPS plan, with no add-on charge and nothing to configure. Combined with VPS pricing that starts in single digits, it’s the lowest-cost route to a server that isn’t naked on the internet.

The honest caveat: Hostinger doesn’t publish a mitigation capacity figure, and by the standard set at the top of this article that’s a real gap — you’re trusting that the filtering is adequate without being told what “adequate” means. OVHcloud publishes 1.3 Tbps and Hostinger publishes nothing. If you have concrete reason to expect a large attack, buy on published capacity rather than on price.

For the ordinary case — a website that might get hit opportunistically, not one with a motivated adversary — included filtering at this price is the sensible default.

Check Hostinger VPS pricing → · Read our Hostinger review

2. OVHcloud — the capacity benchmark, and it’s free

1.3 Tbps of always-on anti-DDoS, included with every VPS, unmetered and with no cap on attack size or duration.

OVHcloud built its own global scrubbing network and gives it away with a €5-ish VPS. Equivalent commercial mitigation services are priced in the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month. The protection is always on — there’s no detection delay while someone decides whether you’re under attack — and OVHcloud doesn’t null-route you for being a target.

This is the strongest network-level protection you can get without paying for it, and if DDoS resilience is genuinely your top requirement, it’s the correct choice on this page regardless of what the ranking above says.

The trade-offs are real elsewhere: the control panel is clunky, support is inconsistent, and OVHcloud’s operational history includes the 2021 Strasbourg datacentre fire, which is a useful reminder to keep backups off-provider. VPS-1 lists at around $6.46/month after the March 2026 pricing change, with 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM and 75GB SSD.

Three claims worth holding other providers to: always-on, unmetered regardless of attack size or duration, and included at no extra cost.

We don’t participate in an affiliate programme with OVHcloud, so there’s no tracked link here. It’s ranked second on the strength of its capacity figure alone.

3. Hetzner — free L3/L4, recently upgraded

Hetzner provides free DDoS protection across all its products, explicitly at layers 3 and 4, with automated detection that identifies attack patterns and routes traffic through scrubbing filters without you filing a ticket.

In a recent infrastructure upgrade, Hetzner deployed Nokia Deepfield Defender across its European datacentres — AI-driven detection with zero-touch automation, meaning the system adapts to new attack vectors without manual rule-writing. That’s a meaningful investment in a capability they don’t charge for.

Hetzner doesn’t publish a headline Tbps number, and their protection is explicitly scoped to L3/L4 — the documentation is refreshingly clear that application-layer attacks are your problem to solve. Combined with the best price-per-spec in the business, it’s an excellent foundation to put Cloudflare in front of.

Check Hetzner Cloud pricing → · Read our Hetzner review

4. Cloudways — the only one covering layer 7

Cloudways includes unmetered DDoS mitigation at layers 3, 4 and 7 on every plan via its Cloudflare integration, starting around $11/month on infrastructure from DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr or Linode.

That layer 7 coverage is the reason it’s this high. Every other provider here hands you volumetric protection and leaves application-layer floods entirely to you. Cloudways bundles the piece most buyers don’t realise is missing, along with managed hosting, staging environments and automated backups.

You’re paying a managed-hosting premium over raw VPS pricing, and you have less control than on an unmanaged box. If you want to run arbitrary services rather than a web application, this isn’t the right shape of product.

Check Cloudways pricing → · Read our Cloudways review

5. Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) — protection on a budget VPS

Note the name. Hosting.com was acquired by World Host Group in January 2025 and rebranded as Hosting.com that April, ending a 23-year run under the original name. Plenty of comparison articles — and plenty of bookmarks — still say “Hosting.com.” It’s the same company, and a2hosting.com now serves Hosting.com branding.

The company bundles what it markets as reinforced DDoS protection with its VPS range, including full root access and free dedicated IPs, backed by a 99.9% uptime commitment. It’s a long-established host with a real support organisation and a reputation built on speed.

As with Hostinger, no mitigation capacity figure is published, so treat this as baseline protection against opportunistic attacks rather than a defence against a determined adversary. We’d also suggest checking current VPS pricing directly rather than trusting figures quoted in older articles, since the plan lineup has moved since the rebrand.

Visiting a2hosting.com today lands you here — the rebrand is complete, not cosmetic.

Check Hosting.com pricing → · Read our review

6. InMotion Hosting — Corero-based mitigation

InMotion Hosting runs its DDoS protection on Corero hardware, monitoring in real time and filtering hostile traffic before it reaches your server. Corero is a serious name in the mitigation industry rather than a generic firewall rule, which is a point in InMotion’s favour.

InMotion’s strengths are US datacentre presence, genuinely responsive support and a solid managed-hosting range. Its pricing sits above the budget European hosts, and again there’s no published capacity figure.

Check InMotion Hosting pricing → · Read our InMotion review

7. Vultr — protection exists, but you have to buy it

DDoS protection is a $10/month per-instance add-on (or $0.015/hour), providing 10 Gbps of mitigation capacity. It is not enabled by default.

Vultr is included here specifically as the cautionary case, because it’s a strong provider that many people assume protects them by default. It doesn’t. If you deploy a Vultr instance and skip the add-on, you have no DDoS protection, and $10/month on top of a $40 plan for 10 Gbps compares poorly with OVHcloud’s 1.3 Tbps for nothing.

Vultr’s genuine advantages are elsewhere — 30-plus global regions and strong single-thread performance. Just don’t assume the protection is switched on, and check before you need it.

We don’t have an affiliate relationship with Vultr, so there’s no tracked link here.

What we excluded, and why

JavaPipe, a long-standing name in DDoS-protected hosting, no longer exists as an independent provider — javapipe.com now redirects to Mochahost, which states that “JavaPipe web hosting is now part of Mochahost.” The combined offering doesn’t publish DDoS pricing or capacity, directing enquiries to sales chat instead. Since this comparison’s qualification rule is published, verifiable capacity, it didn’t qualify. Older articles still recommending JavaPipe’s 750 Gbps protection are describing a product that has since been absorbed.

Specialist scrubbing services like Path.net and Voxility are genuinely stronger than anything here, but they’re remote-protection services you point at existing infrastructure via GRE tunnels, not VPS plans. If you’re at the scale where you need them, you know already.

How we picked

We applied one rule: DDoS protection had to be included in the base price and always on, and we gave strong preference to providers that publish a mitigation capacity figure. Only OVHcloud and Vultr publish concrete numbers, which itself tells you something about industry norms.

We have not run attack simulations against these providers, and you should be sceptical of anyone claiming they have. Capacity figures, protection layers and hardware vendors come from provider documentation and published announcements; where a provider declines to publish a number, we’ve said so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.

Some links here are affiliate links, and we’ve noted explicitly where a provider isn’t one — including OVHcloud, which we’ve ranked second on merit despite earning nothing from it.

FAQ

Is free DDoS protection actually good enough?

For the attacks most sites face, yes. OVHcloud’s free 1.3 Tbps exceeds what most paid commercial services offer, and Hetzner’s automated L3/L4 filtering handles the volumetric attacks that make up the bulk of incidents. The gap isn’t in the free volumetric protection — it’s that almost none of it covers layer 7, which is where an application-focused attacker will go.

Do I still need Cloudflare if my VPS has DDoS protection?

Usually yes, and they solve different problems. Your host’s protection stops floods from saturating your network link. Cloudflare — even the free tier — sits in front of your application and filters the request-level attacks your host can’t see, while hiding your origin IP so attackers have to get through it. The combination is the standard architecture for a reason.

What is null-routing and why is it bad?

Null-routing (or blackholing) means your provider instructs the network to discard all traffic destined for your IP address. It protects the provider’s network by completing the attack against you: your server becomes unreachable to everyone. Some budget hosts describe this as DDoS protection. Check the acceptable use policy for the terms “null route” or “blackhole” before you buy.

Does DDoS protection slow down my site?

Always-on scrubbing adds a small amount of latency because traffic passes through filtering infrastructure — typically low single-digit milliseconds, which no user perceives. Reactive protection that only engages during an attack avoids that overhead but introduces a detection delay during which you’re down. Always-on is the better trade.

Can a VPS survive a large attack on its own?

No, and this is worth being blunt about. A volumetric attack saturates your network link upstream of your server. Server-side tools — iptables rules, fail2ban, kernel tuning — are useless against traffic that never reaches you because the pipe is already full. Mitigation has to happen upstream at the provider’s edge, which is exactly why the provider you choose matters more than anything you configure.

Is DDoS-protected hosting worth paying extra for?

Given that OVHcloud, Hetzner and Hostinger include it at no cost, paying a premium specifically for L3/4 protection is hard to justify. Choose a provider that includes it, put Cloudflare in front of your application for layer 7, and spend the money you saved on backups instead. Our VPS hosting comparison covers the wider provider field if DDoS resilience is one requirement among several.