The four questions that decide it
- Player count — a 12-player SMP and a 400-player network need different tiers, and possibly different providers. Free tiers exist; know their caps.
- Budget — realistic spend for serious protection runs $0–40/mo at small-to-mid scale. Beware both 'free' services with pay-to-actually-work tiers and enterprise pricing you'll never use.
- Player region — filtering close to your players keeps latency invisible. Check where a provider's PoPs are, not just how many; Arvoris runs 7 dedicated PoPs across NA, EU, the Middle East and Asia.
- Premium or offline mode — offline-mode servers face cheaper, nastier bot attacks and need real antibot verification, not just flood filtering.
The criteria checklist
| Protocol-aware L7 filtering | Parses Minecraft handshakes, pings and logins — the difference between stopping bot joins and just rate-limiting bandwidth |
| Real player IPs (PROXY protocol) | Non-negotiable: without it, bans and alt detection break. Check whether it costs extra — on Arvoris it's on every plan, including Free |
| Anycast edge | Players should enter the network at a nearby city, not one central scrubbing site an ocean away |
| Transparent pricing | Published per-plan prices with hard limits beat 'contact us' — you can't budget around a sales call |
| Free tier / trial | You should be able to test with your real players before a card is involved |
The established options
Three names come up in every serious comparison: TCPShield, NeoProtect and Arvoris. All three are purpose-built for Minecraft rather than generic TCP filtering, and any of them is a defensible choice. Rather than a biased teardown here, the feature-by-feature comparisons live on their own pages: Arvoris vs TCPShield and Arvoris vs NeoProtect.
Where Arvoris fits
Arvoris is built for the budget-to-mid segment: Free at $0 (15 players, full pipeline), Budget at $10/mo, Essential at $25/mo, Value at $40/mo for 500 players — full matrix here. Everything rides Cloudflare Spectrum's 500+ Tbps anycast edge into Cryo's Layer-7 filtering, with antibot, AntiVPN and (Essential+) stolen-account detection included instead of sold as add-ons. Largest mitigated to date: a 7.15 Tbps volumetric flood and a 50-million-connection Layer-7 attack.
Who Arvoris is not for
Honesty cuts both ways. If you run a 100,000-player mega-network with a dedicated infrastructure team, you want the premium sister brand Papyrus — custom capacity, hands-on engineering, contracts. If you're a hosting company wanting to resell protection under your own brand, that's the Enterprise plan (white-label, SSO, dedicated locations), not a self-serve tier. And if your server has zero attack history and 5 players, even Free is optional — though at $0 the insurance costs nothing.
A sane way to decide this week
Shortlist the three names above, read both comparison pages, then test the free options against your real traffic — Arvoris signup takes about five minutes and one DNS record, so trying it costs an evening, not a migration. Whichever you pick, the reasons to have protection at all haven't changed: attacks are cheap to buy and expensive to eat.
Common questions
What is the best DDoS protection for a small Minecraft server?+
For servers up to 15 concurrent players, Arvoris Free is hard to argue with: the full mitigation pipeline — 500+ Tbps anycast edge, Minecraft-aware Layer-7 filtering, real player IPs — at $0 with no card. TCPShield also offers a free tier; compare the limits and features against what your server needs.
What should good Minecraft DDoS protection include?+
Five things: Minecraft-protocol-aware Layer-7 filtering (not just bandwidth), real player IPs via PROXY protocol, an anycast edge so players enter at a nearby city, transparent published pricing, and a free tier or trial so you can test under your own traffic before paying.
Is Arvoris better than TCPShield or NeoProtect?+
'Better' depends on your situation. TCPShield and NeoProtect are established, competent services. Arvoris' case is a full pipeline on the free plan, antibot and AntiVPN included rather than sold separately, and paid tiers from $10 to $40/mo. The comparison pages walk through the differences feature by feature so you can judge against your own requirements.
Do offline-mode (cracked) servers need different protection?+
They need more of it. Without Mojang authentication, anyone can join under any name, so bot attacks are cheaper to run against you. Prioritize services with a real verification layer — Arvoris' CryoLimbo gauntlet (captcha and behavioral checks) plus AntiVPN exist for exactly this, with custom offline messages from the Budget plan up.
Does server region matter when choosing protection?+
Yes, twice: where the anycast edge lets players enter (Arvoris uses Cloudflare's 330+ cities, so entry is local almost everywhere), and where filtering PoPs sit — Arvoris runs 7: New York, Miami, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Singapore and Tokyo, with geo-steering picking the nearest automatically.