Game servers hand their address to strangers, run mostly on UDP and notice every lost packet, so a generic flood filter can hurt as much as the attack. What a Minecraft server should expose, how a Velocity proxy hides the backend, why open query ports reflect floods, and what to ask a host.
A server cannot filter a flood that has already filled its port, so protection has to sit upstream. How the filtering works, why hosts null-route unprotected IPs, always-on versus on-demand, what a 100 Gbps tier does and does not cover, how big a tier to buy and seven questions to ask any host.
Anza's Agave docs spell out what a Solana validator needs: a 2.8 GHz base clock on a recent CPU, 256 GB of RAM, separate NVMe drives for accounts and ledger, and 2 to 10 Gbps for a staked node. We check each line against real builds, show which fail, and cover the disk layout, sysctl and firewall settings.
Nobody watches the hardware of a dedicated server for you. What to monitor in five layers: disks, RAID, ECC memory and IPMI sensors; space, memory, load and clock; interface errors and bond members; the service from a second location; and a minimal Prometheus and Alertmanager stack with seven alert rules.
A Java Edition server runs its world on one thread with a 50 ms budget per tick, so clock speed matters more than core count. What the server uses, Java against Bedrock, which server software to run, sizing by players, three settings that beat new hardware, and when a VPS gives way to a dedicated machine.
Managed Kubernetes hides the control plane, the load balancers and the storage behind an API and bills for every gigabyte that leaves. On bare metal, compute is cheaper and egress is flat, but those pieces become yours. The decisions in order, with a costed three-server cluster at the end.
Low prices come from three places: paid-off hardware, a thin network, or missing essentials. Only the first is a good trade. What a 2016 dual Xeon gives up against a new EPYC, the network fine print to read, price per thread against a VPS, and four checks to run on delivery.
Ashburn sits next to the transatlantic cable landings and within about 15 ms of New York, Toronto, Chicago and Atlanta. How it pairs with a European primary, why one TCP flow across the Atlantic cannot fill a big port, and what the GDPR says about putting EU data there.
Poland is the EU's fifth most populous country, and every Baltic capital and Kyiv sit within 9 ms of floor from Warsaw. For game servers, regional services and patch-day delivery that distance is the whole argument. The latency table, the sizing rules and when Warsaw is the wrong pick.
Marseille faces south and east: it is where 2Africa, PEACE and AAE-1 come ashore. For North Africa it is 650 to 800 km closer than Frankfurt; for the Gulf it is the European end of the cable. The latency table, the video and regional workloads that fit, and the limits.
For users in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Serbia, a server in Frankfurt adds 15 to 20 ms to every round trip. Bucharest removes it at the same price, keeps the data in the EU, and is where our 96 TB storage servers live. The latency table, the workloads and the sizing.
Amsterdam and Frankfurt are under 4 ms apart, so for most of Europe the choice is a wash. At the edges it is not: the UK, Ireland, the Benelux and the Nordics lean Amsterdam. The latency table, the VPN and delivery workloads that suit it, and a sizing rule for each.