DDoS attacks come in three broad families: volumetric floods that saturate your pipe, protocol attacks that exhaust connection state, and application-layer floods that look like legitimate traffic. Each one exhausts a different resource, so each one needs a different defence, and no single layer stops all three. This guide maps the common attack forms to the resource they target and the mitigation that actually works against them, explains what an on-host firewall can and cannot stop, and ends with a practical incident-response runbook for when your server is under fire.

A game server is a single-threaded simulation loop on a fixed clock, so it lives or dies on per-core speed and steady timing, not core count. A shared VPS puts a hypervisor's scheduler between that loop and the CPU, and the jitter shows up as missed ticks. Bare metal removes the layer. This pillar covers bare metal against a VPS and managed game panels, why clocks beat cores, real RAM figures for Minecraft, Rust, ARK, Palworld, Valheim and CS2, storage and DDoS reality, running Pterodactyl or its Pelican fork yourself, and the honest cases where a VPS is still the right call.

Ping is only part of what a player feels. A single round trip runs through input sampling, the last mile, transit and peering, a queue on the server, and the wait for the next simulation tick before the world reacts at all. This guide breaks down where felt delay actually comes from, how tick rate and netcode change the picture, why jitter and packet loss hurt more than a stable higher ping, and the one lever a host controls most: putting the server close to players on hardware that holds its tick rate.

Most server sizing goes wrong in one of two directions: paying for cores that idle at 3% for a year, or discovering at launch that the database's hot set doesn't fit in RAM. Both mistakes come from skipping the same step: sizing from the workload instead of from a price list. This guide gives you the method (baseline, headroom, growth), the per-workload heuristics for CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth, and the honest answer to when you should scale up versus out.