Sharktech vs Koddos: Built-in DDoS protection on every plan, up to 50% off annual billing

If you've ever been on the receiving end of a DDoS attack, you already know the panic. Traffic spikes, the dashboard goes red, and suddenly your game server, your storefront, or your client's site is gasping for air. That's usually the moment someone Googles something like "sharktech vs koddos" — because both names keep popping up whenever DDoS-protected hosting gets discussed, and you're trying to figure out which one actually deserves your money.

I've spent some time digging into both, and honestly, they're not really playing the same game. They overlap in one important area — keeping your stuff online when someone tries to flood it — but they come at the problem from very different angles. Let me walk you through what I found.

The short version: two different philosophies

Sharktech is a US-based hosting provider (headquartered in Las Vegas) that has been around for about 20 years. They run their own AS (AS46844), peer at major Internet Exchange Points, and treat DDoS protection as something that's just baked into everything they sell — VPS, bare-metal dedicated servers, and OpenStack cloud. Their pitch is essentially: "we're an ISP that also happens to filter attacks for you, and you don't pay extra for the filtering."

KoDDoS, on the other hand, leads with the protection itself. Their whole identity is anti-DDoS and offshore hosting. They sell DDoS protection as a standalone product (you can point traffic at their scrubbing network even if your server lives elsewhere), and they emphasize offshore locations like the Netherlands and Hong Kong for privacy and content-freedom reasons. Their mitigation capacity goes up to 350 Gbps on the high-end dedicated packages, with a 550 Gbps network behind it.

So the question isn't really "which is better" — it's "which one fits what you're actually trying to do."

DDoS protection: included vs. the main event

This is probably the biggest practical difference, and it's worth slowing down on.

With Sharktech, every VPS, every dedicated server, and every cloud instance comes with their proprietary DDoS protection already attached. For Smart VPS plans, that's up to 60 Gbps of mitigation. Their dedicated server line sits on a 40G/100G network. There's no "DDoS add-on" line item on your invoice — it's just there. One of their long-term game-hosting customers mentions routinely absorbing attacks in the 3–8 Gbps range without noticing, which lines up with what the network is built for.

With KoDDoS, DDoS protection is the product you're shopping for. Their standalone protection starts around $39.99/month for up to 30 Gbps and scales up. If you want the big guns — their DDoS-protected dedicated server with up to 350 Gbps of mitigation — you're looking at around $450/month for an E3-1230 class machine. That's a serious piece of kit for a serious attack surface, and it's clearly aimed at people who know they're a target.

The takeaway: if you want protection to be invisible and included, Sharktech's model is simpler. If you want to dial in a specific mitigation capacity, or you need something north of 100 Gbps on a single box, KoDDoS gives you more explicit knobs to turn.

If you want to see how Sharktech's included protection feels in practice, you can check current plans and pricing here:

👉 Explore Sharktech DDoS-protected hosting plans

Pricing and plans: flat-rate vs. tiered

This is where the two really diverge, and where I think Sharktech has a noticeable edge for the average buyer.

Sharktech Smart VPS (NVMe-backed)

Sharktech's VPS line runs on Xeon Gold CPUs with NVMe storage, on Proxmox clusters with 40G interconnects. Pricing is flat — they explicitly advertise "no shocking overage bill," and third-party reviews confirm the no-overage approach. Here's what the current lineup looks like:

• Tiny — 1 vCore, 2 GB DDR4, 40 GB NVMe, 4 TB transfer, 60 Gbps DDoS, 1 Gbps port. $7.95/month, or $3.98/month if you pay annually (50% off).

• Small — 2 vCores, 4 GB DDR4, 80 GB NVMe, 8 TB transfer. $15.95/month, or $7.98/month annually.

• Medium — 2 vCores, 8 GB DDR4, 160 GB NVMe, 16 TB transfer. Around $31.95/month, with the same 50% annual discount applying.

Billing cycles stack discounts: quarterly gets you 25% off, semi-annual 35%, and annual 50%. You can deploy VMs across any of their five data centers (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Amsterdam) and split your resource pool however you like — one big VM, or a bunch of small ones spread across regions.

For a lot of people, the Tiny plan at under $4/month on annual billing is enough to get a real feel for the network before committing to anything bigger:

👉 Try Sharktech Smart VPS from $3.98/month (annual)

Sharktech Bare-Metal Dedicated Servers

These start around $189/month and scale up with hardware. All of them include DDoS protection, hardware-level management access through their control panel, 1 Gbps to 40 Gbps port options, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Hardware is customizable (CPU, RAM, GPU, disk) and the sales team will quote custom configs if the website doesn't list what you need. Setup is free on dedicated servers.

KoDDoS plans

KoDDoS has a wider menu, and the pricing reflects that they're selling different things:

• Offshore shared hosting (Netherlands) — starts at $8.95/month for Plan A (20 GB storage, 300 GB traffic per third-party listings), scaling up through Plan B and Plan C with more storage and bandwidth. Good fit if you want anonymous offshore hosting with cPanel/Litespeed and DDoS protection included.

• Managed VPS (Netherlands or USA) — starts at $43.99/month. Fully managed with cPanel/WHM, daily backups, free migration, root access. A managed offering is something Sharktech doesn't directly match — Sharktech's Smart VPS is unmanaged/self-managed by default.

• Hong Kong Managed VPS — starts at $49.99/month, aimed at fastest routes into China.

• Standalone DDoS protection — from $39.99/month (up to 30 Gbps), scaling to higher tiers.

• DDoS-protected dedicated servers — from $450/month with up to 350 Gbps mitigation.

So KoDDoS is generally more expensive at the entry point for comparable compute, but they offer things Sharktech doesn't: managed VPS with cPanel, offshore/Hong Kong jurisdictions, and standalone protection you can put in front of infrastructure that lives somewhere else entirely.

Locations and network

Sharktech runs five data centers — Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and Amsterdam — all enterprise-grade, all on their own AS with direct peering. Being their own ISP means they can filter malicious traffic closer to the source, which helps latency for legitimate users. They support IPv4 and IPv6 and are findable on PeeringDB.

KoDDoS focuses on the Netherlands (their offshore flagship), the USA, and Hong Kong. The Hong Kong option is genuinely a differentiator — if your audience is in mainland China or you need that specific jurisdiction, Sharktech doesn't have an equivalent. The Netherlands angle matters for people who want more permissive content rules and DMCA forwarding rather than takedowns.

Support and guarantees

Both offer 24/7 support. Sharktech leans on having real humans behind live chat and tickets, and they make a point of saying their support links are easy to find (a subtle jab at bigger providers that hide them). Their uptime guarantee is 99.99% (some marketing pages push "six 9s," but the committed figure on dedicated servers is 99.99%). One thing to be aware of: third-party reviews note Sharktech does not offer refunds under any circumstances, which is fairly standard for VPS/dedicated but worth knowing before you commit.

KoDDoS advertises 99.9% uptime and emphasizes their DDoS expert team monitoring attacks in real time. They offer a money-back guarantee on their DDoS protection product specifically (there's a dedicated page for it), which is a bit more buyer-friendly on that particular line.

So which one should you pick?

Here's how I'd think about it:

• You want a VPS or dedicated server and want DDoS protection to just be included, with flat pricing and no overage surprises. Sharktech is the cleaner fit. The annual 50% off makes even the Tiny plan genuinely cheap to try, and the included 60 Gbps mitigation covers the vast majority of real-world attacks.

👉 Get started with Sharktech and lock in 50% off annual billing

• You specifically need offshore or Hong Kong hosting, or you want a fully managed VPS with cPanel. KoDDoS is the better match — Sharktech doesn't really play in the offshore/anonymous space or the managed-VPS-with-cPanel space.
  
  

• You need standalone DDoS protection in front of infrastructure you already have, or you need mitigation capacity above 100 Gbps on a single protected server. KoDDoS sells those explicitly; Sharktech's protection is tied to their own hosted services.
  
  

• You're running game servers, real-time apps, or anything latency-sensitive across multiple US/EU regions. Sharktech's multi-region deployment on one resource pool, plus their own ISP peering, is a strong story here.
  
  

For most people searching "sharktech vs koddos," the use case is the first one — they want a host that won't fall over when traffic gets weird, and they don't want to pay a premium for the word "DDoS" on the invoice. If that's you, Sharktech's included protection and transparent pricing make it an easy place to start, especially with the annual discount:

👉 View Sharktech plans and current promotions

Whichever way you go, the honest answer is that both are competent at what they do — they're just optimized for different buyers. Pick the one that matches the problem you actually have, not the one with the more impressive-sounding marketing.