How ESAGAMES Anti-DDoS Protection Works

Plenty of hosts say "DDoS protected". Here is what that actually means at ESAGAMES — the layers your traffic passes through, and why protection is on by default for every service we host.

The problem we had to solve

Modern attacks reach terabits per second and ramp to full power in seconds. No single server can absorb that, and "turning on" protection after an attack starts is already too late. Protection has to live on a large network, in front of your machine, running all the time.

Layer 1 — a multi-Tbps network edge

All traffic to your server first enters our filtering network in Frankfurt, home to the world's largest internet exchange. This edge has the capacity to soak up large volumetric floods that would instantly saturate an ordinary connection.

Layer 2 — automatic scrubbing

Inside the network, traffic is continuously inspected. Known attack patterns — volumetric floods, protocol abuse, reflection and amplification — are dropped at the edge, while clean traffic for your players keeps flowing. There is no button to press; mitigation reacts in real time.

Layer 3 — in-house XDP filtering

On top of the upstream network we run our own mitigation built on XDP — packet filtering that runs in the Linux kernel at line rate, before traffic ever reaches the game process. This lets us write game-aware rules for the exact ports and protocols games use, instead of relying on generic filters.

• Game-aware — tuned for the real traffic of Minecraft, Rust, FiveM, CS2 and more.
• Line-rate — drops bad packets in the kernel without burning your server's CPU.
• Always on — no activation, no per-attack billing, no "protection add-on".

Why we built our own instead of reselling

Relying on a single upstream filter means you inherit its blind spots and its latency. By combining a multi-Tbps network with our own XDP layer, we control the rules, tune them for games, and keep mitigation close to the server — which means lower latency for players and fewer false positives.

Good protection should be invisible: your players never notice the attack, and you never get a bill for surviving one.

The result is simple for you: every game server, VPS and voice server we host is filtered by default. For the full technical write-up and a live mitigation view, see our Anti-DDoS page.