Why We Chose Path.net for DDoS Mitigation

DDoS protection is the single most important infrastructure decision a game hosting company can make. Get it wrong, and your customers suffer through downtime, latency spikes, and false positives that block real players. We spent months evaluating every major mitigation provider before settling on Path.net. Here's why.

The Problem with "Good Enough" Protection

When we started GoodLeaf, we used the same DDoS protection that most hosts use — the built-in mitigation from our upstream transit providers. It worked for basic volumetric floods. Then our customers started getting hit with FiveM-specific attacks.

Eulen and similar booter services don't just throw raw bandwidth at your server. They craft packets that mimic legitimate FiveM client connections. The attacks passed right through generic mitigation because, at the network level, they looked like normal game traffic.

Our customers were paying us for protection that didn't actually protect them. That was unacceptable.

What We Evaluated

We tested four categories of DDoS mitigation:

1. Cloudflare Spectrum: Excellent for web traffic, but adds 5-15ms latency for game traffic. The UDP proxying doesn't understand game protocols, leading to false positives during attacks. Players were getting disconnected during mitigation events.
2. OVH Anti-DDoS: Decent for basic Layer 4 floods, but their Game DDoS Protection profiles are limited to specific games. FiveM support was unreliable, with legitimate traffic being filtered incorrectly.
3. Custom iptables / fail2ban: Good as a supplementary layer, but useless against volumetric attacks that saturate your uplink before packets even reach your firewall.
4. Path.net: Purpose-built for game and real-time application traffic. 17Tbps global capacity with game-aware packet inspection at the network edge.

Why Path.net Won

Three factors made Path.net the clear winner for our use case:

1. Game Protocol Awareness

Path.net's filtering engine understands game protocols at the application layer. It can differentiate between a real FiveM client handshake and a spoofed one. This means during an active attack, legitimate players stay connected with zero impact while malicious traffic is silently dropped.

2. Edge Mitigation with Minimal Latency

Unlike proxy-based solutions that add a hop between the player and your server, Path.net mitigates at the BGP routing level. Clean traffic is forwarded directly to our servers with less than 1ms of additional latency. During an attack, players literally don't notice.

3. Capacity That Actually Matters

17Tbps isn't just a marketing number. We've seen attacks in the 500Gbps+ range against our customers, and Path.net absorbed them without breaking a sweat. The network has headroom for attacks that are 30x larger than the biggest we've ever seen.

Real-World Results

Since switching to Path.net, our customer-facing DDoS impact has dropped to near zero. Here's what our metrics look like:

• Average attack duration experienced by customers: 0 seconds (attacks are mitigated at the edge before reaching the server)
• False positive rate (legitimate players blocked during mitigation): <0.01%
• Additional latency on clean traffic: <1ms
• Largest attack successfully mitigated: 640Gbps

We came over to GoodLeaf and they walked us through 3/4 different rounds of attacks to get us completely dialed in and protected. We have not had a problem since. It's a night and DAY difference to any other hosting site!

— Sammy - Synergy RP

The Cost of Good Protection

Path.net isn't cheap. It costs significantly more than relying on upstream transit mitigation or basic OVH protection. But we made the decision early on that DDoS protection isn't an area where we cut costs. Every GoodLeaf plan — from our $5/month Budget VPS to our enterprise dedicated servers — includes the same Path.net protection. No tiers, no upsells.