When trying to defend your organization against DDoS attacks, one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal is access to DDoS protection service providers. With DDoS protection services, your organization’s websites can remain secure through tactics such as the clean pipe method or collected distribution networks (CDNs).
The following vendors are a sampling of some of the best DDoS protection service providers on the market today, and most can be deployed in any industry, from gaming to e-commerce to manufacturing to energy.
Most of the vendors listed here scored well in the Forrester DDoS Wave. In addition to handling traditional DDoS attacks, they incorporate cloud, mobile, and IoT capabilities, as well as a range of advanced features and services.
Table of Contents
9 Best DDoS Protection Services Providers for (2026)
1. Akamai
Akamai offers three cloud solutions specifically designed to provide end-to-end DDoS defense for organizations. The combination of Prolexic, Edge DNS and App & API Protector is recommended for the highest quality DDoS mitigation to keep applications, data centers and Internet-facing infrastructure (public or private) protected.
Effective mitigation techniques exist for all classes of application-layer DDoS/DoS attacks, including those designed to exhaust resources, those that exploit vulnerabilities that can cause availability issues (such as buffer overflows), those that exploit flaws in application business logic, compromise API infrastructure and bot attacks.
Key Differentiators
Akamai’s Prolexic global security operations centers (SOCCs) provide fully managed DDoS protection backed by industry-leading service level agreements and support. It combines mitigation with Akamai’s security operations centers to stop attacks on all ports and protocols before they become business-impacting events.
Edge DNS is a DNS service that moves DNS resolution from on-premises or data centers to Akamai’s Intelligent Edge. It is designed for uninterrupted DNS availability and high performance, even in the face of major DDoS attacks. It can be deployed as a primary or secondary solution with optional DNSSEC support to protect against DNS spoofing and manipulation.
Akamai also offers extremely robust protection against DDoS attacks at the application layer through its WAAP solution known as App & API Protector. Prolexic offers over 10+ Tbps of dedicated DDoS scrubbing capacity to mitigate attacks instantly through its zero-second SLA.
Over 225 Akamai SOCC front-line responders who act as an extension of the customer’s incident response team to balance automated detection and response with human engagement.
Customized attack drills are provided to optimize incident response and maintain operational readiness.
Pricing
At the time of writing, Akamai has not published pricing for its DDoS protection on its website. However, interested buyers have access to a 60-day free trial of its Edge DNS solution.
Imperva DDoS Protection can cope with any type of asset with a 3-second mitigation time for any type of attack. Onboarding is said to be easy and fast, while operation is simplified with out-of-the-box policies and self-adaptive tuning capabilities. Imperva Attack Analytics increases visibility and reporting.
This approach provides a holistic view of all attack types and layers, and correlates them to accelerate the investigation process while reducing alert fatigue. Imperva works across a wide range of industries, including: e-commerce, energy, financial services, gaming, healthcare, manufacturing and technology.
Key Differentiators
Protects websites, networks, DNS and individual IPs
Stops Layer 3, 4 and 7 attacks
9 Tbps, 65 GPP capacity
24×7 support and SOC with global coverage
Single stack architecture reduces latency and enables rapid remediation of DDoS attacks and other web application threats
Each of the 50 points of presence (PoPs) within Imperva’s global network runs all security services (DDoS, WAF, API security, bot management)
Imperva provides a 3-second mitigation SLA for any DDoS attack, regardless of type, size or duration, without disrupting legitimate traffic.
Provides real-time visibility into DDoS threats with reporting and correlation of attacks via Imperva Attack Analytics or a SIEM integration
Self-adapting security policies, self-service configuration and Terraform and API support
Pricing
At the time of writing, Imperva does not make pricing for its DDoS protection available on its website. However, interested buyers have access to a free trial.
Radware offers DDoS protection across any infrastructure deployment for public cloud, enterprise and specifically for service providers. It protects data center, private cloud, public cloud and 5G infrastructure through an environment-independent solution designed to help service providers protect large-scale networks.
Key Differentiators
Radware’s attack mitigation architecture is flexible and scalable
Can be tailored to customers such as telecom and cloud operators
Broad security coverage with automated protection against zero-day DDoS attacks
Offers on-demand, always-on, hybrid cloud DDoS service deployment options
SSL attack protection in the cloud that keeps user data confidential
Single pane of glass with unified portal and service fully managed by Radware’s emergency response team.
Also offers Web application security for integrated application and network security.
Combines always-on detection and mitigation with cloud-based volumetric DDoS attack prevention, debugging, and 24×7 cyber and DDoS attack security.
Pricing
At the time of this writing, Radware has not published pricing for its DDoS protection on its website.
Cloudflare’s cloud-based DDoS protection system can cope with layer 7 attacks as well as layer 3 and 4 attacks. Instead of using dedicated anti-DDoS hardware, every machine in your global network participates in DDoS mitigation. Your DDoS protection safeguards websites, applications and entire networks, while ensuring that the performance of legitimate traffic is not compromised.
Key Differentiators
Cloudflare’s 100 Tbps network blocks an average of 76 billion threats per day, including some of the largest DDoS attacks in history.
Its continuous, unmetered DDoS protection for web assets (HTTP/HTTP) is backed by Cloudflare’s global network intelligence.
It works in tandem with Cloudflare’s cloud-based web application firewall (WAF), bot management and other L3/4 security services to protect assets from cyber and network threats.
Cloudflare Spectrum is a reverse proxy service that provides DDoS protection for any application (not just the web), such as FTP, SSH, VoIP, gaming or any application running over a TCP/UDP protocol, and comes with built-in load balancing and traffic acceleration for L4 traffic.
Cloudflare Magic Transit provides BGP-based DDoS protection for network infrastructure in both always-on and on-demand deployment modes.
Data centers in 250 cities in 100 countries advertise customer subnets to ingest network traffic and mitigate threats near the source of the attack.
Centralized and decentralized mitigation systems work together to identify and mitigate most DDoS attacks in less than 3 seconds.
Preconfigured static rules are deployed in less than 1 second.
Built-in analytics provide insight into traffic patterns and observed (and blocked) threats from the dashboard or via Cloudflare’s GraphQL API.
Can integrate with third-party SIEMs
Pricing
At the time of writing, Cloudflare has not published pricing for its DDoS protection on its website.
Vercara (formerly Neustar) UltraDDoS Protect offers over 12 Tbps of DDoS mitigation and a dedicated global data scrubbing network to help maintain online presence, reduce the threat of theft and protect the bottom line. Vercara offers local hardware to instantly stop smaller attacks, as well as the UltraDDos Protect cloud for when the volume and complexity of attacks skyrocket.
Key Differentiators
Automation that quickly moves attacks to mitigation
Always-ready options for DNS, BGP and hybrid configurations
Carrier-class DDoS mitigation including a massive network of dedicated scrubbing capability
OSI layers 3, 4, 7 and IPv6.
Globally positioned scrubbing infrastructure
Leverages multiple DDoS mitigation vendor technologies, including Arbor, Cisco, Citrix, Juniper, HP and Vercara.
Multiple Tier 1 Internet network providers
Offers on-premises hardware and cloud-based protection
Vercara can protect VPN connections using VPN Protect
Can connect to 61 global data centers to control traffic and increase security
Pricing
At the time of writing, Vercara has not made public the prices of its DDoS protection on its website.
To stop sophisticated DDoS attacks, NetScout offers a portfolio of DDoS attack protection products and services that allows organizations to customize a solution, whether hosted in the cloud or on-premises.
Stateless, on-premises and cloud hybrid protection can stop today’s high-volume attacks, often exceeding 600 GB/s, as well as stealthy application-layer attacks against stateful infrastructure devices such as firewalls, IPS and ADCs.
Key Differentiators
Located on-premises, NetScout’s Arbor Edge Defense (AED) is an in-line, always-on product that can automatically detect and stop all types of DDoS attacks, especially slow and low application layer attacks.
Positioned at the edge of the network between the router and the network firewall to provide best-in-class DDoS protection, AED examines inbound and outbound traffic using stateless packet processing technology.
It can easily scale and block inbound DDoS attacks and indicators of compromise in bulk.
Its cloud-based signaling capability automatically routes traffic to one of 14 scrubbing centers for analysis and mitigation to stop the attack within minutes.
ATLAS Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT) provides real-time attack intelligence that enables it to automatically block up to 90% of DDoS attack traffic before it starts inspecting the first attack packet
Set of automated countermeasures that identify and block more complex attacks at the network or application layers
Stops threats such as scanning, brute-force password attempts and known Indicators of Compromise (IoC).
Blocks outbound communications traffic from internal devices compromised with known malicious sites (e.g., attacker command and control infrastructure).
Pricing
At the time of this writing, NetScout has not published pricing for its DDoS protection on its website.
Ribbon offers a set of basic Session Border Controllers with advanced DDoS detection and mitigation features. It provides DDoS detection and mitigation through dynamic configuration and adaptation at scale, with minimal or no impact on traffic throughput or packet processing.
Key Differentiators
ACL policing applies access level control to allow traffic from preconfigured trusted IP addresses.
IP address learning: When IP addresses used by valid peers/endpoints are not known in advance or may change dynamically, peers are confirmed as trusted only upon receipt of specific valid SIP requests.
Media packet policing: accepts media packets only if they correspond to a negotiated session via SIP/SDP signaling.
Priority-based packet control: rate limiting of SIP signaling packets based on microflow and higher priority to packets from authenticated sources than those from unknown sources to increase the likelihood that desired traffic will be let through while malicious traffic is stopped.
Call Admission Control (CAC) at the application level to rate limit traffic at the IP trunk peer/trunk/group level and can also be provided to limit bandwidth usage.
Pricing
At the time of this writing, Ribbon has not published pricing for its DDoS protection on its website.
AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that protects applications running on AWS. It defends against the most common and frequent network and transport layer attacks targeting websites or applications. It provides always-on detection and automatic in-line mitigations that minimize downtime and application latency.
Key Differentiators
No need to sign up for AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.
All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of AWS Shield Standard at no additional charge to defend against most common and frequent network and transport layer DDoS attacks.
Using AWS Shield Standard with Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 provides full availability protection against all known infrastructure attacks (Layer 3 and 4).
For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53 resources, the company offers AWS Shield Advanced. In addition to the network and transport layer protections that come with Standard, AWS Shield Advanced provides additional detection and mitigation against sophisticated and large DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks, and integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall.
AWS Shield Advanced provides 24×7 access to the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT) and protection against DDoS-related spikes on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53 charges.
Pricing
AWS Shield is available in two subscription levels: Standard and Advanced. AWS Shield Standard has no monthly fee. AWS Shield Advanced offers its features for $3,000 per month per organization. Amazon requires AWS Shield Advanced subscribers to commit for a minimum of 1 year when selecting this subscription level.
GCore offers DDoS protection services at both the web application and server level with an edge cloud infrastructure. These services can protect against up to three layers of attack, typically the network (L3) and transport (L4) layers. Real-time bot protection and a next-generation firewall (NGFW) are also part of its offering. Interested buyers can also contact GCore to develop customized features tailored to their company’s needs.
Key Differentiators
Real-time bot protection by blocking unwanted bot traffic to your website and APIs
More than 140 points of presence (PoP) on 5 continents
HTTP/2, IPv6 and web sockets support
Focuses on blocking sessions rather than individual IP addresses
Can provide load balancing options, such as Round Robin, weighted Round Robin and IP hashing
Can be combined with other GCore offerings, such as an all-in-one streaming platform and global hosting.
Pricing
GCore offers its DNS services for web applications in 3 pricing tiers. Free is offered at no cost but with limited features. Pro provides more features at a cost of $2.95 per month. Enterprise provides the most features and costs a minimum of $295 per month. Both Pro and Enterprise also charge application fees after a certain number of applications. Pro starts charging $0.20 per million requests after the first 10 million requests. Enterprise charges $0.16 per million requests after the first 1 billion requests. For server protection, GCore’s three pricing tiers are a bit different. The Start tier charges $2.60 per month for L3 and L4 protection for 1 Mbps. The Pro level costs $3.90 per month for L3, L4 and L7 protection for 1 Mbps. The Custom level offers more features, but requires contacting GCore’s sales team for a quote. GCore cautions interested buyers that its pricing may vary depending on location.
DDoS protection providers can defend your network or website using a number of different tactics and techniques. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The three most commonly used tactics are the clean pipe method, content delivery network (CDN) dilution and TCP/UDP-DDoS proxy.
Clean Pipe Method: This technique essentially routes all traffic through a decontamination pipe, identifying and separating malicious traffic from legitimate traffic. Malicious traffic is blocked, while legitimate traffic can access your website.
CDN: A set of distributed networks that serve content to users. As such, the servers closest to a user will provide content instead of the original server. The high bandwidth offered by a CDN makes it ideal for absorbing DDoS attacks at the network (L3) and transport (L4) layers. In addition, since the original server is not the one responding to user requests, it is much more difficult for DDoS attacks to reach the target server.
TCP/UDP proxy protection: This tactic works similarly to CDN dilution, but for services that use the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Services using these protocols include email and gaming platforms.
Conclusion
In conclusion, protecting your website from DDoS attacks is crucial to ensure its availability and security. By exploring and discovering the best DDoS protection services, you can fortify your online presence and safeguard your digital assets. These services offer advanced mitigation techniques, real-time monitoring and robust security measures to defend against malicious attacks.
Consider factors such as effectiveness, scalability, support and price when choosing the right DDoS protection service for your website. With the best protection, you can minimize downtime, maintain a reliable online presence and provide a secure experience for your users. Stay proactive in defending against DDoS threats and make an informed decision to protect your website from potential damage.
FAQs
What is DDoS protection and why is it important for my website?
DDoS protection refers to measures taken to defend a website against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks overload a website’s servers with a flood of incoming traffic, making it inaccessible. DDoS protection is crucial to ensure the availability and security of your website, as it helps mitigate and block these malicious attacks.
How do DDoS protection services work?
DDoS protection services work by monitoring incoming traffic to your website and analyzing it in real time. When a potential DDoS attack is detected, the service deploys mitigation techniques such as traffic filtering, rate limiting and load balancing to prevent the attack from overwhelming your servers. These services employ advanced algorithms and technologies to identify and block malicious traffic, allowing legitimate visitors to access your website without interruption.
What are some key features to consider when evaluating DDoS protection services?
When evaluating DDoS protection services, consider features such as the service provider’s track record and experience in handling DDoS attacks, the effectiveness of their mitigation techniques, the scalability of their services to handle large volumes of traffic, the level of customer support they offer and their pricing structure. In addition, look for services that offer real-time monitoring, attack analysis and robust reporting capabilities.
How can I determine if a DDoS protection service is effective for my website?
To determine the effectiveness of a DDoS protection service, look for independent reviews and customer testimonials. Evaluate their attack mitigation track record and success rates in keeping websites online during DDoS incidents. It is also beneficial to learn about the specific techniques and technologies they employ to combat DDoS attacks and ensure they match your website’s requirements.
Are DDoS protection services suitable for all types of websites?
Yes, DDoS protection services are suitable for all types of websites, regardless of their size or industry. Whether you have a small business website, an e-commerce platform or a large enterprise site, it is essential to protect your online presence from DDoS attacks. The level of protection required may vary depending on the volume of traffic to your website and the sensitivity of the data, but there are solutions to suit all needs.
Henry Sprung is an e-commerce tech blogger with several years of experience in online retail. Alex’s blog focuses on topics such as online marketplaces, payment processing, and digital marketing for e-commerce businesses. Henry’s expertise in e-commerce provides valuable insights into the latest trends in online retail and how businesses can use these platforms to grow their sales. He is a valuable resource for online retailers and entrepreneurs looking to start their own e-commerce businesses.
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