RageMP DDoS protection

Why RageMP servers get hit

A RageMP server is a live session with an audience watching it, which is most of the reason roleplay communities see more of this than a static site of the same size ever would. The attack produces something the attacker can watch happen. Players time out, the server empties, and the community Discord does the rest.

The transport makes it easier to try. RAGE:MP carries its session traffic over UDP, and UDP gives a network device no handshake at the transport layer to lean on when it decides whether a packet came from a real client. Something has to understand the framework specifically to make that call.

What RageMP DDoS protection covers today

Being exact about this is more useful than quoting a capacity number.

Every packet aimed at our range crosses the scrubbing layer before it reaches a customer machine, and on Shield that happens continuously rather than after a trigger. For RAGE:MP the profile is flagged experimental, which is how we mark one that is still being tuned. It applies the baseline anti-spoofing and connection-flood filtering, so the traffic patterns behind most of what people report get dropped at the edge.

What it does not do yet is validate the RAGE:MP handshake the way the Cfx.re profile validates FiveM’s. A crafted packet that looks structurally plausible is judged on rate and shape rather than on whether a real RAGE:MP client could have produced it. If that distinction matters for what is hitting you, the next section is the one to read.

None of that changes the always-on part. Shield keeps every packet crossing the filter continuously, so the roughly five second detection window that exists on the reactive line does not exist here. That window is the thing that disconnects a full server at once.

If you need a dedicated RAGE:MP filter

Ask for one. We write custom XDP filters for customers as part of support rather than as billed consulting, and RAGE:MP is a case where asking is worth it if you are being hit more than once.

Open a ticket with the attack signature, the affected port, or just the IP being hit: submit a support ticket. Bring a packet capture if you can get one, because a filter written against traffic we can look at beats a filter written against a description of it.

Which machine to run it on

For a server with players connected, Shield. The always-on filtering is the part that helps a RageMP server today, and it helps regardless of how mature the per-title profile is, because the detection window it removes has nothing to do with which game you run.

If budget is the constraint, the standard VPS line includes reactive mitigation at no surcharge and costs less. That is a real option for a development box or a server you are still putting together. It is the wrong trade once people are connected, for the reason above.

Where to run it

Our filtering and our machines are both in the Frankfurt metro, so packets for players across Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Poland are not detoured to another country to be cleaned and sent back. If your community is mostly North American, a European host is the wrong answer however good the filtering is.

RAGE:MP asks for less than FiveM at the same player count, mostly because the asset stacks tend to be smaller, but the shape of the problem is the same. Your scripts run on one thread, so clock speed sets the ceiling and spare cores go to the database rather than to the tick.

The runtime is the part that is easy to forget. A gamemode written against Node or .NET keeps that runtime resident next to the game process, and a garbage collector under load is exactly the sort of pause that reads as lag to a player. Leaving headroom above what the server appears to need is worth more here than the last gigabyte of the tier below.