Well there is Frantech / BuyVM. We had a VM we used as a proxy for about $15 a year + the $3 IP DDoS filtering. We had several proxies on top of our Limestone Networks server (they didn't offer protection at the time - still this is cheaper).

Game servers become hot targets by kids who just don't care and do anything to get your server taken down, whether it be competition or a user got banned or just about any reason they can sum up to try and find any given approach to take your service down.

Edit:

Forgot to mention the free CloudFlare option as well (unless they stopped doing this, haven't had to deal with these things in a few years, but I have a feeling it's still about the same, there's likely even more offers now out there).

Well, if it's true journalism, you sign up for project shield for free and laugh at the kiddiots banging their collective heads against the immovable mountain that is Google.

https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/

So your recommendation for people who have material that might incite a DDoS is let Github/Gitlab/another free hosting service deal with the expense/inconvenience?

I don't believe that gitlab's offered service is "DDoS Protection"

I wonder how big of a DDoS you can withstand (and remain operational) with Cloudflare Free/Pro.