Relay port abuse
The Steam facing port is reachable independently of the game port, so it can be pressured on its own while the game port looks entirely healthy.
Included on every plan
Project Zomboid DDoS protection that is already on.
Project Zomboid holds a Steam relay port beside the game port and keeps the world, and every character in it, on the server. Long running saves are the whole point of the game.
Project Zomboid hosting from $19.50/mo, protection included.
Mitigation always on
500+ Tbps
Volumetric
Absorbed at the edge
13+ Tbps
Stateful
Game aware filtering
6
Regions
Every region we run
$0
Add on cost
Never an upsell
Terabit DDoS Protection, on every Project Zomboid build
Project Zomboid server protection, tuned to how the game talks.
The filtering in front of your server is the Terabit mitigation network. It keeps hosting online through volumetric floods, protocol abuse and the game specific patterns that generic filtering treats as ordinary traffic, and it does that without adding latency to a single player.
- Stateful, game aware filtering with up to 13+ Tbps of capacity worldwide.
- Up to 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity absorbed through transit partners.
- Always on, with no detection delay and no added latency when it engages.
- Attack leak patching handled by the network's own engineers.
What the internet can reach.
Mitigation is only as good as its understanding of what it is protecting. These are the ports a server has to leave open to be playable, and what each one invites.
UDP 16261
The world and every character in it, none of which live on the player's machine.
UDP 16262
Reachable independently of the game port, so it can be pressured on its own while the game port still looks perfectly healthy.
These are the player facing defaults, the same ones published in every server browser. Control ports are deliberately not listed: on a page about attack surface, enumerating the control plane is pointing at it.
Attacks Project Zomboid servers face.
Volumetric floods are the easy half. The half that breaks game servers is abuse that looks almost exactly like a real player.
Volumetric flood
Enough raw traffic to saturate the link in front of an otherwise healthy server. Nothing on the box is wrong, which is what makes it hard to diagnose without filtering upstream.
Save window targeting
An unclean stop between writes costs progress the server had not committed yet, which on a months old save is not a small loss.
Volumetric floods
UDP and TCP floods, ICMP, DNS amplification, NTP reflection and memcached abuse. Traffic profiles whose only goal is to saturate the link, which they can do without the server ever noticing.
Protocol attacks
SYN floods, fragmented packets, LAND variants and state exhaustion. These do not need volume, only asymmetry: each packet costs far more to process than it does to send.
Botnet and zero day
Distributed traffic from compromised hosts with mixed signatures that adapt over time, and novel patterns nobody has a filter for yet. Both are answered by people rather than by a rule written in advance.
Four stages, none of them on your node.
Filtering happens upstream. By the time traffic reaches your server it has already been through every stage below.
Anycast ingress
Traffic enters at the closest edge instead of one choke point, so a flood is split geographically before anything is filtered.
Volumetric scrubbing
L3 and L4 floods are absorbed at edge capacity. The bulk of any attack dies here, off your node entirely.
Stateful filtering
What survives meets protocol aware rules that understand what a real Project Zomboid join looks like and what a forged one looks like.
Clean traffic
Only validated traffic reaches your server. Your players stay connected and your tick rate does not move.
How the network compares.
What generic hosting ships out of the box, next to the filtering in front of your Project Zomboid server.
| Terabit.io Parent company | OVHcloud | Qonzer | Serverse | Hetzner | Nitrado | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edge filtering capacity | 500+ Tbps / 13+ Tbps | 50+ Tbps | 20+ Tbps / 100+ Gbps | 10 Gbps | Not stated | Not stated |
| Global points of presence | 13+ | 40+ | Not stated | Not stated | 5+ | 12 |
| Mitigation latency | 0 ms | 0 to 5 ms | Variable | 0 to 5 ms | 0 ms | Variable |
| Filtering pipeline | Triple layer | Advanced | Advanced | Advanced | Basic | Basic |
| Layer protection | L3 / L4 / L7 | L3 / L4 / L7 | L3 / L4 | L3 / L4 / L7 | L3 / L4 | L3 / L4 |
| Always on mitigation | Included | Partial | Included | Partial | Not included | Not included |
| Anycast network | Included | Included | Included | Included | Not included | Not included |
| Game aware filters | Included | Partial | Included | Partial | Not included | Not included |
| Custom filters | Included | Not included | Not included | Not included | Not included | Not included |
| A2S query caching | Included | Not included | Not included | Not included | Not included | Not included |
| Mitigation dashboard | Included | Partial | Included | Not included | Not included | Not included |
| Owned infrastructure | Included | Included | Partial | Not included | Partial | Not included |
| Attack leak response | Live engineer response | Standard | Not stated | Not stated | Standard | Not stated |
| Get protected | ||||||
Scroll the table sideways to see every provider.
Comparison data is drawn from each provider's publicly advertised pages, checked August 2026. Providers change what they publish, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a live feed.
An attack lands when it costs you the most.
Zomboid worlds run for a very long time. The cost of an outage is not the session, it is the risk to a save nobody wants to restart.
That is the entire argument for filtering that is always on rather than filtering somebody switches on after the complaints start.
Mitigation built around game traffic.
Generic filtering is written for websites. Almost none of what breaks a game server looks like a web request.
Stateful capacity, in house
Up to 13+ Tbps of stateful filtering worldwide, owned and operated rather than rented from someone further upstream.
Volumetric headroom
Up to 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity through transit partners, absorbed at the edge before it reaches a node.
Always on, zero added latency
Filtering never waits to be switched on, and engaging it does not cost your players a millisecond of ping.
Leaks patched by engineers
When something novel gets through, the people who tune the filters work here. It is not a ticket handed to an upstream vendor.
Priced by resources, not slots
You pay for memory, cores and storage. Protection is not a tier, an add on, or a reason to sell you a bigger plan.
Built for both shapes of attack
A hundred gigabits of junk and a precisely crafted handshake abuse are different problems. The pipeline is designed to answer both.
There is no tier to choose.
The filtering is identical on every server we run. The only thing left to decide is whether you want an IP address that is yours alone.
- Included
- Not an add on, and not a tier you select.
- Always on
- Never waits for someone to notice an attack.
- 0 ms
- Filtering happens upstream, not on your node.
- Alerts
- Discord and email when it starts, and when it clears.
Loafhosts is part of Terabit.io, and the protection on your Project Zomboid server is the Terabit mitigation network: 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity absorbed at the edge, and 13+ Tbps of stateful filtering that admits only the traffic your server expects. It runs in Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Frankfurt and Sydney, which is every region we operate.
Project Zomboid DDoS protection questions.
Is DDoS protection included with every Project Zomboid server?
Yes. Terabit DDoS Protection is on every Project Zomboid server from the first minute, at no extra cost. There is no tier to choose, nothing to switch on, and no upsell. It covers 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity and 13+ Tbps of stateful filtering.
What kinds of attacks does it stop on a Project Zomboid server?
Relay port abuse, Volumetric flood, Save window targeting, alongside the general volumetric and protocol families. Project Zomboid holds a Steam relay port beside the game port and keeps the world, and every character in it, on the server. Long running saves are the whole point of the game.
Will the filtering add latency to my server?
No. Mitigation is always on and runs upstream of your node rather than on it, so there is no detection delay to wait through and no filtering cost on your own hardware.
Do I need a dedicated IP for Project Zomboid?
No. The filtering is the same on every server regardless of whether the IP is shared or yours alone. A dedicated IP is offered because some people want an address of their own, not because it filters differently.
What happens if an attack gets through?
Attack leak patching is handled by the Terabit network team rather than passed to an upstream vendor. Every server keeps its own attack history, so you can see when you were hit and how long it ran.
Protection on the rest of the lineup.
Same network, same posture, a different surface to defend.
Launch a protected Project Zomboid server.
You do not configure it, you do not pay extra for it, and you do not wait for an attack to find out whether it works.
Included on every plan No setup fees Cancel any time