Recently, I’ve been helping a few friends from domestic game studios choose high-protection CDNs, digging through the pricing sheets of all the major providers on the market. Sitting in my Silicon Valley apartment, sipping coffee while organizing this data, I suddenly realized how deep the water runs in this industry—

Under the same banner of “T-level protection,” prices can differ by two to three times, with hidden terms as numerous as pay-to-win traps in a game.

Cloudflare’s enterprise plan requires direct negotiation with sales, but the free version is actually sufficient for small-scale attacks. Last week, I helped a small indie game team test it—they have just over 20,000 monthly active users, and when hit with a 30Gbps DDoS attack, the free version surprisingly held up.

But if you really want advanced protection, such as Magic Transit with AI-based behavioral analysis, the base fee starts at $5,000/month, plus about $0.10 per GB of traffic.

The worst part is that Asia-Pacific nodes cost extra, which is quite unfriendly for games with a large Chinese player base.

Alibaba Cloud’s International Edition DDoS High Defense IP looks cheap on paper—$388/month for basic protection with 20Gbps defense included.

But in actual use, you’ll find that anything beyond 20G costs an extra $15 per G. Last month, a Chinese mobile game launched and was hit with an 80G attack—the daily protection fee alone shot up to over $1,000.

And that’s not even counting the China Telecom BGP bandwidth, which must be purchased separately at $1.20 per Mbps/month. For a game with 500,000 concurrent players, bandwidth costs alone can easily hit six figures.

Akamai’s Prolexic is the true premium option—the sales pitch starts with “$1 million annual contract minimum.”

But the high price comes with a reason—last year, a well-known esports game was crippled by a 600Gbps attack, and switching to Akamai brought it back online in just ten minutes.

However, a closer look at the contract revealed a detail: traffic fees at the Japan scrubbing center are triple those in Europe or the US, meaning East Asian gaming companies are effectively paying a “regional tax.”

Unexpectedly, Korean provider CDNetworks turned out to be a hidden gem in terms of value. For the same 300Gbps protection spec, Cloudflare quoted $20,000/month, while CDNetworks offered an all-inclusive plan for $9,000.

In testing, the Shanghai node latency was 67ms, far better than some Western providers that route through Japan at 180ms. The downside is that their documentation is a mix of Korean and English, and if you need tech support at 3 AM, you’ll have to account for the time difference.

Here’s the three-tier advice I give my friends now:

Small teams: Cloudflare free plan + Alibaba Cloud pay-as-you-go;

Mid-sized projects with $1M/month revenue: CDNetworks Asia-Pacific custom package;

Those who really need to withstand terabit-level attacks: just go with Akamai’s enterprise contract.

Lastly, never believe ads claiming “unlimited protection”—one Hong Kong provider’s contract had a hidden clause capping scrubbing at 300G, in font so tiny you’d need a magnifying glass to read it.

Our Pricing

Flexible Package Options

• Monthly
• Yearly

Standard

Great for large teams

$

800

/Monthly

Get Started

• 

  DDOS Protection Value: 200Gbps

• 

  CC Defense Value: 40000QPS

• 

  Number of Domains: 10

• 

  SSL Certificate: YES

• 

  Anti-blocking: YES

• 

  Websocket: YES

• 

  Network Acceleration: YES

Business

Advanced projects

$

2000

/Monthly

• 

  DDOS Protection Value: 400Gbps

• 

  CC Defense Value: 50000QPS

• 

  Number of Domains: 50

• 

  SSL Certificate: YES

• 

  Anti-blocking: YES

• 

  Websocket: YES

• 

  Network Acceleration: YES

Get Started

Enterprise

For big companies

$

5000

/Monthly

Get Started

• 

  DDOS Protection Value: 500Gbps

• 

  CC Defense Value: 200000QPS

• 

  Number of Domains: 100+

• 

  SSL Certificate: YES

• 

  Anti-blocking: YES

• 

  Websocket: YES

• 

  Network Acceleration: YES

Get Free Quote How We Work

Honestly, choosing high-protection is like equipping game gear—there’s no absolute best option.

Just yesterday, I helped a friend remove an “Intelligent Threat Analysis” add-on from their plan—it cost $8,000/month, but with open-source WAF rules and some custom scripts, you can achieve about 70% of the same effect.

The savings were enough to buy three physical servers—in times like these, even the richest landowners aren’t exactly flush with extra cash.