VPS with DDoS Protection: Built-In 60Gbps Mitigation, Flat Transparent Pricing From $3.98/mo

There's a particular kind of disappointment that comes with hosting. You sign up, the price looks fine on paper, the marketing pages are shiny, and then three months down the road your site drops during a sale, support takes two days to answer, and the "DDoS protection" they advertised turns out to mean they'll just null-route your IP until the attack gets bored and goes home.

That's not how Sharktech handles it. And honestly, that's pretty much the whole story — but I'll fill in the details anyway, because the details are where it gets interesting.

Why People Go Looking for a VPS with DDoS Protection

Most people who type "vps with ddos protection" into a search box aren't doing it for fun. They're doing it because something already went wrong. A game server got flooded. A small business site got knocked offline during a launch. A community forum got hit because someone got mad in a thread. The motivation is almost always retrospective — you got burned once, and now you want to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The tricky part is that the phrase "DDoS protection" gets thrown around the hosting industry the way cereal boxes slap "part of a balanced breakfast" on the label. It sounds reassuring. It rarely means what you hope it means. So when you're shopping for a VPS with DDoS protection, the real question isn't whether the provider claims to have it — almost all of them do. The question is whether the protection is something that's actually built into the network, or something they bolt on as a line item and charge you extra for.

This is the angle where Sharktech separates itself from most of the pack, and it's worth explaining why.

A Network Built on the Assumption That Attacks Are Normal

Sharktech has been running servers since 2003, which is before YouTube existed. While a lot of hosting companies spent the last two decades rebranding and chasing VC money, Sharktech was quietly building infrastructure in Las Vegas and spreading outward. Today they operate five data centers — Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, and Amsterdam — and they run their own network as their own ISP, peering at major Internet Exchange Points.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. When you're your own ISP, you can filter malicious traffic closer to the source instead of waiting for it to arrive at your door. Sharktech's whole network was designed around the idea that DDoS attacks are a daily reality, not some rare edge case you handle with a panic phone call.

The practical result: every plan, including the cheapest VPS they sell, comes with 60Gbps of DDoS protection per IP. That's included, not an upsell. For context, the volumetric attacks that take down average hosts usually run somewhere between 5Gbps and 20Gbps. One of Sharktech's gaming clients reportedly absorbs attacks in the 38Gbps range on a regular basis without their servers flinching. The mitigation runs on BGP, Anycast, and GRE across all locations, and it scrubs traffic automatically — no manual intervention, no waiting on a ticket.

If you've ever had a host null-route your IP during an attack and tell you to "wait it out," you understand why that distinction matters.

The Smart VPS Lineup: What You Actually Get

The Smart VPS is where most people should start looking. These are virtual private servers built on Proxmox clusters with native NVMe storage and Xeon Gold processors — not the oversold budget hardware you find in a lot of cheap VPS ads. Every plan comes with full root access, a choice of Linux or Windows, 1 IPv4 address plus a /64 IPv6 block, NoVNC browser-based console access, weekly automated backups, and free migration from another host.

The pricing is flat and transparent, which is a refreshing change from the introductory-rate-then-triple-it-after-a-year trick that's standard in this industry. Billing cycles come with automatic discounts — quarterly gets you 25% off, semi-annual 35%, and annual 50%. You don't need to hunt for a coupon code for the VPS discounts; they just apply when you select the billing cycle.

Here's how the tiers break down.

Tiny

The entry point. Monthly billing is $7.95, and if you pay annually that drops to $3.98/mo — which works out to about $47.76 for a full year of a Xeon Gold-backed NVMe VPS with 60Gbps of DDoS protection included. This is the plan Sharktech themselves suggest you grab if you're not sure what you need yet and just want to spin up a small project to feel it out.

Best for: hobby projects, personal sites, DNS, small dev environments, anyone who wants to test the waters before committing.

👉 Try the Tiny Smart VPS plan

Small

A step up in resources. Monthly sits around $15.95, dropping to roughly $7.98/mo on annual billing. Same 60Gbps DDoS protection, same NVMe storage, same Xeon Gold cores — just more of them.

Best for: small business websites, low-traffic WordPress installs, lightweight app backends.

👉 Check out the Small Smart VPS plan

Medium

Monthly around $39.95, or about $19.98/mo if you commit to annual. This is the sweet spot for a lot of people — enough CPU and RAM to handle a real workload without feeling cramped, and the DDoS mitigation means you can actually sleep through a bad night.

Best for: Drupal or WordPress sites with real traffic, small SaaS apps, medium-traffic e-commerce, databases under moderate load.

👉 Get started with the Medium Smart VPS plan

Large

$99.95 monthly, dropping to $49.95/mo on annual billing. This is where you start being able to host heavier applications without compromise — larger sites, busier databases, more concurrent users.

Best for: high-traffic websites, larger application backends, production databases, teams running multiple services on one box.

👉 Deploy a Large Smart VPS plan

Colossal

The top of the Smart VPS line. Monthly $299.99, around $149.99/mo on annual billing. This is the plan you reach for when "Large" isn't enough and you don't want to jump all the way to a dedicated server.

Best for: large-scale hosting, game server farms, heavy database workloads, resource-intensive applications that still want the flexibility of a virtualized environment.

👉 Scale up with the Colossal Smart VPS plan

What Independent Benchmarks Actually Found

It's easy to make performance claims on a marketing page. It's harder to fake them under third-party benchmarking. HostAdvice's testing of the Smart VPS turned up some numbers worth repeating:

• Over 6,000 random IOPS on 4K block reads and writes — most budget VPS plans barely scratch 2,000.

• Sub-millisecond network latency: 0.547ms to Google DNS, 0.835ms to Cloudflare.

• Roughly 19GB/sec memory throughput, which is closer to dedicated hardware than to what you'd expect from a VPS.

• 5.33 Gbps download on a 10Gbps port during stress testing.

• Under simultaneous CPU, memory, and disk stress: no throttling, no performance degradation.

The multi-thread CPU score came in at 7.65x single-thread performance, which tells you they're not quietly cramming too many VMs onto a host and hoping nobody notices. For database-heavy workloads, e-commerce, or anything that hammers MySQL or Redis all day, those IOPS numbers translate directly into faster real-world page loads.

Promo Codes Worth Knowing About

The annual VPS discount is automatic — you don't need a code for it. But for dedicated servers and cloud plans, there are a couple of recurring promo codes floating around that are worth applying at checkout:

• Y5YET1Z9EK — 10% recurring lifetime discount on dedicated servers and cloud plans. For Amsterdam-specific resources, the same code unlocks a 20% recurring discount.

• WHTFALL — 33% recurring off on Cloud Virtual Data Center services, which start around $26/month after the discount.

These aren't first-month-only teasers. They apply every billing cycle, for the life of the service. That's a meaningful difference from the "50% off your first month!" style promos that quietly evaporate.

👉 Apply your promo code and configure a plan

Support: Real Humans, Not Chatbot Escalation Chains

Support is available 24/7/365 via live chat, email, phone, and tickets. During independent testing, ticket responses came in around 12 minutes, and the responses were technically accurate rather than the generic "have you tried restarting it?" script you get from tier-one support at the big clouds.

One IT professional with 15+ years of experience — someone who'd worked extensively with AWS and Azure — specifically called Sharktech's support "exceptional" after switching, noting that they actually understand your problem and help you solve it instead of escalating you through three tiers of people who don't.

Free migration assistance is included too. If you're currently on another host and want to move your VPS or environment over, their team handles it at no extra charge. That alone can save you a weekend of late-night config files.

The Honest Tradeoffs

Sharktech isn't for everyone, and they're upfront about that — which is honestly part of why they're worth considering. A few things worth knowing going in:

• No refunds. All payments are non-refundable, including setup fees and recurring charges. If you have a billing dispute, you have 30 days from the invoice date to raise it, and if it's resolved in your favor you'll get a credit. This is standard practice in dedicated and VPS hosting, but it's worth factoring into your decision before you commit to a year.

• Unmanaged by default. You're expected to know your way around a server. Nobody is going to walk you through basic Linux commands. The knowledge base is solid and support is technically capable, but if you want hand-holding through server administration, this isn't the right fit.

• cPanel costs extra. It's $25/month on VPS plans, $39/month on dedicated servers. Not unusual in the industry, but worth budgeting for if you need it.

Who This Is Actually For

The profile is pretty specific, and it's worth being honest about it:

• Developers and sysadmins who want predictable, unthrottled infrastructure without shared-hosting surprises.

• Gaming companies or applications that regularly attract DDoS traffic — this is where Sharktech genuinely shines, and where a lot of their client testimonials come from.

• Businesses migrating off AWS or Azure to cut cloud costs without giving up performance or control.

• Anyone who's ever had a host null-route their IP during an attack and swore they'd never let it happen again.

• International businesses that need flexible payment options — they accept credit cards, PayPal, Alipay, wire transfers, Western Union, and even checks.

If you're a total beginner looking for a managed shared WordPress host, this isn't where you should be shopping. But if you've outgrown that and you need infrastructure that actually works when it matters — especially under attack — Sharktech is one of the more honest choices in a market that's not exactly famous for honesty.

The Bottom Line

Sharktech has been doing this since 2003. They run their own network. DDoS protection is baked into every plan, not sold as a premium add-on. Pricing is transparent, with no introductory rates that quietly triple after year one. Support actually picks up. And when an attack hits, your server stays up instead of getting pulled offline by the people you're paying to protect it.

If "vps with ddos protection" is what you went looking for, this is what it actually looks like when a provider means it.

👉 Start with a Tiny Smart VPS at $3.98/mo on annual billing

👉 Browse all Sharktech VPS and dedicated server plans