If you have searched for DDoS protection you have run into DNS-proxy services: you change your domain's DNS to point at the provider, and from then on every request goes through their edge before it reaches your server. Cloudflare popularised the model; smaller and free services such as DNSProxy.org offer the same basic shape. This guide explains how it works, what the free tier actually buys you, and what to verify before you trust any of them, including us.
What DNS Proxy DDoS Protection Actually Is
The name is slightly misleading: the DNS change is just how you onboard. The protection itself is a reverse proxy. You point your A or CNAME record at the provider, the provider terminates the connection, inspects the request, and forwards clean traffic to your origin. Because the world now resolves your domain to the proxy, attackers hit the proxy instead of your server, and your origin IP can be kept off the public record.
The one thing that makes or breaks it
A DNS-proxy only protects you while attackers cannot find your real origin IP. If your server's address is already public, or leaks through email headers, old DNS records or a direct-connect subdomain, an attacker bypasses the proxy entirely. Rotate the origin IP after you move behind any proxy.
What the Free Tiers Give You
Free reverse-proxy protection is real and useful, especially for small sites, but the free tier is deliberately a floor, not a ceiling. Across providers you can generally expect:
- Automatic filtering of obvious volumetric and bot traffic at the edge.
- A hidden origin IP, which alone removes the easiest attack path.
- Basic challenge and rate-limit behaviour, often with limited or no per-site tuning.
- Little to no contractual guarantee: free means best-effort, and support is usually community-only.
That is genuinely worth having. Just be clear-eyed that a free tier is not the same as a tuned, managed defence, and that a provider's headline capacity number describes their network, not what your free site is guaranteed to receive during an attack.
Questions to Ask Before You Route Traffic Through Any Proxy
- Can I keep my origin IP private, and does the service help me rotate it?
- Which layers does it actually cover? Application-layer (L7) filtering is different from network-layer volumetric absorption, and many services are strong at one and thin at the other.
- Can I tune protection for my site: rate limits, challenge modes, WAF rules, country and IP lists? Or is it one global setting?
- What happens to non-browser traffic, such as payment callbacks, webhooks and API clients, when a challenge is active?
- What is the data and logging policy? Your users' requests now pass through a third party.
- Is there any commitment behind uptime claims, or is a big capacity number just marketing?
Where Akarguard Fits, Honestly
We won't claim a bigger network than we run today — but we're building fast, with new edge locations in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States on the way. Akarguard is an independent provider built on a hardened reverse-proxy edge, and what sets it apart is transparency and control: you manage protection modes, per-domain rate and connection limits, a Naxsi-based WAF with a live detections view, and country/ASN/IP lists yourself from the panel, and every mitigation event produces an alert and a downloadable PDF report. Our real numbers are published openly on our DDoS statistics page rather than asserted in marketing copy.
If you are choosing between free reverse-proxy options, judge them on the questions above, not on the largest number on the homepage. The model is sound; the difference is in how much control and honesty you get with it. For the mechanics of the reverse-proxy approach, see our guide on how reverse-proxy DDoS protection works.