Best Remote DDoS Protection: Always-On Scrubbing, No Hardware Headache

DDoS attacks are one of those things that sound boring until they happen to you. One minute your game server is humming along, your storefront is taking orders, your DNS is quietly doing its job, and the next minute everything is just gone. Not crashed, not slow, gone. The pipe is full of garbage traffic, your real users can't get through, and the only thing working is the support ticket queue at your hosting provider asking you, very politely, to leave.

That's the moment most people start Googling "best remote DDoS protection." Not as a hypothetical. As an emergency. And that's also the moment you realize there are roughly a hundred vendors saying roughly the same thing, all charging wildly different amounts of money for wildly different amounts of help.

So let's actually talk about what "remote DDoS protection" means, what makes one option better than another, and where Sharktech fits into the picture, because that's the brand that keeps coming up when you dig into this space, and there are some real reasons for that.

What "Remote" DDoS Protection Actually Is

Most people picture DDoS defense as a box you plug in, or a CDN you point your domain at. Remote DDoS protection is a third option, and in some ways it's the most powerful one, because it doesn't care where your servers live.

The idea is simple in concept, elegant in execution. A provider with serious scrubbing infrastructure establishes a BGP session with your network. You announce your IP prefixes to them. They announce those prefixes to the internet. Inbound traffic now flows through their scrubbing centers before it reaches you. When an attack hits, their firewalls filter out the junk and forward only the clean traffic back to you over a GRE tunnel.

No new hardware. No software to install on your boxes. No migration. Your servers stay exactly where they are. The protection layer sits upstream, between the internet and your front door.

The catch, and it's a real one, is that you typically need to own at least a /24 IP block, and you need something on your end that can speak BGP and terminate a GRE tunnel. A soft router works. If you're a hobbyist with a single VPS and no IP allocation of your own, remote protection in this strict sense isn't really the tool for you. But if you run a network, a hosting business, an ISP, a game server operation, or anything where you announce your own prefixes, this is the most flexible defense you can buy.

Why People End Up Looking For The "Best" Option

The pain that drives this search is pretty consistent across the forums and review threads. It usually goes one of three ways.

First, there's the "my host suspended me" story. Someone rents a cheap dedicated box, gets hit by a 20Gbps flood, and the provider pulls the plug rather than eat the attack. The customer gets a polite email about "acceptable use" and suddenly needs a new home, fast.

Second, there's the "CDN only protects the web layer" problem. Cloudflare-style services are great for HTTP traffic, but they don't help with UDP game traffic, arbitrary TCP services, or anything that isn't fronted by a reverse proxy. The moment you need to protect the network layer itself, you're looking at a different category of product.

Third, there's the "enterprise pricing gave me a heart attack" situation. Akamai Prolexic, AWS Shield Advanced, Radware, F5, NETSCOUT Arbor, these are serious platforms used by serious enterprises, and they are priced like it. We're talking thousands per month, sometimes tens of thousands, often with lengthy contracts and per-IP or per-resource add-ons. Great if you're a bank. Less great if you're a mid-size game host.

The "best remote DDoS protection" for most real-world operators ends up being the one that sits in the middle: enterprise-grade mitigation, but at a price point that doesn't require a CFO's signature, and with a deployment model that doesn't force you to rip out your existing infrastructure.

Where Sharktech Comes In

Sharktech has been doing DDoS mitigation since 2003, which in this industry is basically forever. They operate their own network as AS46844, peer at major internet exchange points, and run scrubbing infrastructure across five data centers: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, and Amsterdam. Their total mitigation capacity is north of 1.1Tbps, distributed across those facilities, and their layered approach lets them shift and adapt as attack patterns change.

The thing that makes them relevant to the "best remote DDoS protection" conversation is that they offer both flavors of protection, and they price it in a way that makes sense for operations that aren't Fortune 500 companies.

Built-in DDoS protection on every hosted service. Every VPS, every bare-metal dedicated server, every cloud instance that lives on Sharktech's network ships with 60Gbps of DDoS protection per IP included in the base price. Not an add-on. Not a checkbox at checkout. Just part of the deal. They handle UDP floods, TCP SYN floods, HTTP floods, ICMP floods, NTP amplification, DNS amplification, SSDP reflection, Memcached reflection, Slowloris, Ping of Death, Smurf, and a long list of other common attack vectors, all at the network edge, before the traffic ever touches your machine.

Remote Network DDoS Protection for external networks. This is the product that directly answers the search intent. If your infrastructure lives somewhere else, on your own IP space, you can still pull Sharktech's mitigation in front of it via BGP and GRE. No migration. No hardware. You keep your upstream provider; you just add a virtual upstream through Sharktech. Detection is automatic, mitigation is real-time, and you can run it always-on or on-demand depending on your traffic profile and budget.

For a lot of operators, this combination is the sweet spot. If you're already hosting with Sharktech, you're protected by default. If you're hosting elsewhere but you own your IP block, you can layer their scrubbing on top without moving anything.

👉 Explore Sharktech's Remote Network DDoS Protection

How The Remote Protection Actually Works

If you're evaluating options, the technical mechanics matter, because they determine what you'll need on your side and how much latency the protection adds.

With Sharktech's remote setup, an external BGP session is established between your router and theirs. You hand them your prefix list, minimum a /24 assigned to your organization. A GRE tunnel is built between your network and theirs. Once your BGP router announces your prefixes to Sharktech, their network announces those prefixes to the internet, so inbound traffic flows through their scrubbing centers.

The traffic is asymmetric. Only ingress, the traffic coming toward you, is routed through Sharktech. Your outbound traffic takes its normal path. This cuts the latency impact roughly in half compared to a fully tunneled setup, because you're not paying a round-trip penalty on responses.

When an attack is detected, the targeted destination is re-routed to Sharktech's on-site firewalls. Malicious traffic gets filtered out. Clean traffic gets forwarded back to you over the GRE tunnel. Your users, ideally, never notice anything happened.

On your end, you need a system that can handle BGP and GRE. A hardware router is not required; a soft router works fine. They also recommend, though it's not strictly mandatory, an MTU of at least 1550 with your upstream provider to account for GRE overhead. If your upstream can't do that, you'll deal with fragmentation, which is survivable but not ideal.

As for attack size, Sharktech's official position is that they have yet to receive an attack they couldn't mitigate, owing to the layered approach and the ability to coordinate across all their data centers and upstream providers. Each facility has at least 1Tbps of connectivity, and their architecture lets them absorb and redistribute attack traffic rather than just trying to block it at a single choke point.

Sharktech DDoS Protection: The Pricing Picture

This is where a lot of the "best" conversation actually gets decided. Mitigation capacity is important, but so is what you pay for it, and whether the price scales sanely as your needs grow.

Sharktech's pricing model is built around two ideas that are less common in this industry than they should be: flat rates regardless of attack size or duration, and protection included by default rather than billed as a premium feature.

60Gbps, included with hosting. If you rent a VPS, dedicated server, or cloud instance from Sharktech, 60Gbps of DDoS protection per IP is part of the package. You don't buy it separately. You don't activate it during an attack. It's just on. For game server operators, small SaaS products, DNS servers, and anything public-facing that attracts attention, this alone can be the difference between a sustainable business and a monthly panic cycle.

100Gbps, as an add-on. If you need more headroom, Sharktech offers 100Gbps DDoS protection as an upgradeable add-on. According to their own announcement when they completed their global router upgrades, the price for 100Gbps DDoS protection on a single IP was reduced to $39 per month, and it can be added to any dedicated or colocated server. That's a notable data point because equivalent capacity from hyperscaler DDoS products can run into the thousands per month per protected IP.

Remote Network DDoS Protection, custom-quoted. For the remote product that protects your external network, Sharktech operates on a consultation model rather than a public price grid. This is standard for serious remote mitigation, because the cost depends on your prefix size, traffic profile, whether you want always-on or on-demand scrubbing, and how much clean traffic you're pushing through the tunnel. You talk to their team, they design a plan, and you get a price that reflects your actual situation rather than a one-size-fits-all number.

👉 Get a free DDoS protection consultation from Sharktech

Smart VPS Plans: DDoS Protection Included, Billing Cycle Discounts Stack

If you're in the market for hosting and you want the DDoS protection to come along for the ride, Sharktech's Smart VPS line is the most direct entry point. Every plan includes 60Gbps DDoS protection, a 10Gbps port, 1 IPv4 address, NVMe storage, and the ability to deploy across all five data center locations.

The pricing structure rewards longer commitments, and the discounts are baked into the billing cycle, so you don't need a promo code to get them:

• Quarterly billing: 25% off the monthly rate

• Semi-annual billing: 35% off

• Annual billing: 50% off, which is the best value tier

Here's how the plans break down, with the annual rate being the one most worth your attention if you know you'll stick around:

Tiny plan. 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 4 TB transfer. $7.95/month, or $3.98/month on annual billing. Good for DNS, small services, a single lightweight app, or just testing the waters.

👉 Deploy a Tiny Smart VPS with 60Gbps DDoS protection included

Small plan. 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe, 8 TB transfer. $15.95/month, or $7.98/month annually. Suits a small website or a modest web application.

Medium plan. 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB NVMe, 16 TB transfer. $31.95/month, or $15.98/month annually. A solid choice for WordPress, Drupal, or a busier app with real traffic.

Large plan. 6 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 320 GB NVMe, 32 TB transfer. $63.95/month, or $31.98/month annually. Handles larger sites and more concurrent users without breaking a sweat.

XL plan. 8 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, 640 GB NVMe, 64 TB transfer. $127.95/month, or $63.98/month annually. Aimed at game servers, heavier applications, and workloads that need both CPU and memory headroom.

👉 See all Sharktech Smart VPS plans and lock in the annual rate

XXL plan. 12 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, 1,280 GB NVMe, 128 TB transfer. $255.95/month, or $127.98/month annually. For serious infrastructure that still wants the simplicity of a VPS footprint.

XXXL plan. 16 vCPU, 128 GB RAM, 2,000 GB NVMe, 300 TB transfer. $511.95/month, or $255.98/month annually. The top of the Smart VPS line, approaching dedicated server territory in terms of raw resources.

All of these plans include the same 60Gbps DDoS protection, the same multi-region deployment, the same 24/7 support, and the same 99.999% uptime SLA. The difference is purely how much compute, memory, and storage you get. If you outgrow a VPS entirely, Sharktech's bare-metal dedicated servers and OpenStack cloud options are the next step up, and they also include DDoS protection by default.

Promo Codes That Genuinely Work

Sharktech isn't a coupon-circus kind of provider. The real savings are structural, like the annual billing discount, or code-based but recurring, meaning the discount applies every billing cycle, not just the first one. Here are the codes that have been verified across multiple hosting communities and review platforms:

• Y5YET1Z9EK: 10% recurring discount on dedicated servers and cloud services. For Amsterdam-based dedicated servers specifically, the same code unlocks 20% recurring off, which makes it particularly competitive for European deployments.

• WHTFALL: 10% recurring off across Cloud Virtual Servers and Bare-Metal Dedicated Servers. Some sources report up to 33% recurring off on Cloud Virtual Data Center services with this code, worth testing at checkout for your specific order.

• NEW2024: 5% recurring off SSD VPS plans. Smaller, but permanent, and it stacks with the annual billing discount for entry-level plans.

👉 Apply promo code Y5YET1Z9EK and get started with Sharktech

The stacking math is the part most people miss. If you take a Tiny VPS at $7.95/month, switch to annual billing for the automatic 50% cut, you're already at $3.98/month. If a code applies to your order on top of that, the savings compound. Just keep in mind that Sharktech doesn't offer a money-back guarantee, so annual billing makes the most sense once you've tested the service for a month and know it fits your workload.

Who This Actually Suits Best

After reading through a lot of reviews, forum threads, and testimonials, the picture of who gets the most value out of Sharktech's approach to DDoS protection is pretty clear.

Game server operators are the loudest happy cohort. Game servers attract attacks the way a porch light attracts moths, and a lot of generic hosting providers respond by suspending the customer. Sharktech built their business around mitigation, so attacks are treated as a network event to be filtered, not a customer problem to be removed. Reviewers running Minecraft and CS:GO servers report taking multi-gigabit attacks without their players noticing.

ISPs and hosting providers who own their own IP space but don't want to build scrubbing infrastructure from scratch. The remote product lets them offer protected transit to their own customers without buying six-figure hardware or hiring a dedicated DDoS engineer.

Small and mid-size SaaS businesses that have outgrown CDN-only protection. If your service includes non-HTTP traffic, APIs on custom ports, real-time components, or anything that a web proxy can't front, you need network-layer defense, and Sharktech's flat pricing makes that affordable at a scale where Akamai or AWS Shield Advanced would be overkill.

Anyone migrating off hyperscalers for cost reasons. Multiple reviewers mention 40%+ savings on comparable infrastructure when moving from AWS or Azure to Sharktech, and that's before factoring in the DDoS protection that would cost extra on the hyperscaler side. Azure's DDoS Network Protection alone can run around $3,000+ per month for 100 IPs; Sharktech includes 60Gbps per IP on every hosted service for free.

Asian-Pacific businesses needing US or EU presence. Sharktech accepts Alipay, which is genuinely uncommon among US providers, and their LA and Las Vegas facilities have peering arrangements that benefit traffic from that region.

What It's Not Great At

Being honest about the trade-offs matters more than pretending a product is perfect.

Sharktech assumes you know your way around a Linux command line. If you need a fully managed, hand-holding experience where someone sets up your web stack for you, this isn't that. The knowledge base is on the thinner side, and the support team is excellent at solving problems but expects you to be able to describe those problems coherently.

There's no money-back guarantee. Payments are non-refundable. So the smart move is to start monthly, confirm the service works for your workload, and only then switch to annual billing to lock in the 50% discount.

For the remote product specifically, the /24 IP requirement is a real gate. If you don't own your own IP block, you can't use remote BGP-based protection from anyone, Sharktech included. In that case, your better path is to host on Sharktech's network directly and get the included protection, or look at a CDN-style product for web-layer defense.

The Bottom Line On "Best Remote DDoS Protection"

"Best" is always a function of what you're protecting, where it lives, and what you can pay. There isn't a single answer that fits everyone.

If you're an enterprise with a seven-figure security budget and a dedicated network team, Akamai Prolexic, Radware, or AWS Shield Advanced are legitimate options with deep catalogs of features and SLAs to match. If you're protecting a web property and nothing else, a CDN-based DDoS product like Cloudflare or Fastly can do the job without you ever touching BGP.

But if you're in the broad middle, running real infrastructure that includes non-web traffic, owning your own IP space or wanting to host somewhere that takes mitigation seriously without charging you like you're a Fortune 500 company, Sharktech is the option that consistently shows up in this conversation for good reason. Twenty-plus years of mitigation experience, 1.1Tbps of distributed capacity, flat pricing that doesn't punish you for getting attacked harder, 60Gbps included on every hosted service, and a remote product that lets you protect infrastructure that lives anywhere.

The "best remote DDoS protection" is the one you can actually deploy, actually afford, and actually trust when the attack comes at 3am on a Sunday. For a lot of operators, that's where Sharktech lands.

👉 Talk to Sharktech about your DDoS protection needs