Zap Hosting

What ZAP-Hosting actually is

ZAP-Hosting is a German game server host — ZAP-Hosting GmbH, Hafenweg 8 in Münster, registered at Amtsgericht Münster (HRB 15672), managed by Marvin Kluck, operating the brand since 2010 according to its own imprint. The company is small and private (Tracxn counts around 16 employees) but it runs its own hardware and network rather than reselling someone else's, and that is the fact that separates it from the dozens of Minecraft resellers on the market.

The product catalogue is wide for a host this size: per-slot game servers (Minecraft, FiveM, Rust, Palworld, Valheim, DayZ, Conan Exiles and 100+ more titles), KVM VPS, bare-metal dedicated servers, TeamSpeak and voice hosting, webspace — all managed through an in-house web interface that ships free with Debian/Ubuntu VPS and dedicated installs. Game servers deploy in minutes with one-click installers and mod packs (CurseForge, Feed The Beast, Technic, ATLauncher), Steam titles are checked for updates every five minutes, and you can switch the game on an existing server for free — only the slot price changes. For a gaming community that runs a Discord bot, a TeamSpeak and a Minecraft server, having one panel and one invoice is the actual appeal.

The infrastructure story is more serious than the product page suggests. The European main location is Eygelshoven — the Netherlands, right on the German border near Aachen, though ZAP's configurator labels it "FFM / Eygelshoven, GER," which we find misleading and buyers should know about. It is a Tier III facility with redundant power and fiber, running dual AMD EPYC 7763 systems (128 cores / 256 threads, up to 2 TB RAM per host) with 100 Gbit/s networking and a triple-replicated NVMe Ceph storage cluster — the only ZAP location with that storage design. In the United States ZAP occupies PsychZ facilities in Dallas and Ashburn with its own Juniper network gear, its own IP ranges (it is a RIPE member), and older-generation hardware (Dell R720 and HP C7000 blades, Xeon CPUs at 3-3.8 GHz).

DDoS protection is the flagship technical claim, and unusually it has been tested in public: ZAP streamed live attack tests on Twitch in July 2025, pushing up to 1.2 Tbit/s at a FiveM server protected by the new PletX filtering system, which stayed online more than 90% of the time — with ZAP openly publishing the failures (capacity limits requiring an extra 400 Gbit/s uplink, and internal attacks launched from its own VPS customers). PletX is protocol-aware: it recognises FiveM's packet structure on port 30120, Minecraft handshakes on 25565, SSH, RDP, WireGuard and more, and filters everything else at the edge. It does not currently filter HTTP/HTTPS, and false positives on unusual protocols are handled by support ticket. The aurologic-derived filter stack runs at the US locations, developed in cooperation with ZAP since 2019.

Pricing: what you really pay

Game servers are priced per slot, with RAM bundled to the slot count — the model that makes ZAP hard to compare and easy to overpay on if you do not do the arithmetic. Minecraft, verified October 2026, euros including VAT, per 30 days:

• 4 slots / 2 GB / 50 GB SSD: €2.76
• 40 slots / 4 GB: €22.63
• 80 slots / 8 GB: €38.64
• 160 slots / 16 GB: €72.86

The cost per GB of RAM rises from €1.38 at 4 slots to roughly €5.66 at 40 slots; the cheaper path is the à-la-carte RAM boost at €2.40/GB (4 slots plus a 2 GB boost = 4 GB for €7.56). Prepaying cuts the bill: -10% at 3 months up to -50% at 5 years. Locations price differently — Dallas, Los Angeles and Ashburn add 11.2%, while London, Montreal, Sydney and Singapore add 56%. Outside Europe the site quotes US dollars by default; third-party price lists show entry Minecraft at about $3.15/month and Rust from $9.85, Palworld from $8.14, Valheim from $9.01, DayZ at $13.45.

The VPS line is more conventional and better value: KVM on AMD EPYC with NVMe on the larger tiers, unmetered traffic on fair-use terms, full root, from about €2.99/month (2 vCPU / 2 GB / 20 GB SSD) up to €19.99 (6 vCPU / 16 GB / 200 GB NVMe) in third-party plan tables, with the site itself quoting "from $8.85." Dedicated servers start around $67/month for Xeon E5v2-class hardware with up to 256 GB RAM and 2x 1 TB SSD, and ZAP is unusual in selling lifetime (pay-once) plans — from around $72 one-time at the bottom of the range. A dedicated IPv4 costs €3 per 30 days.

Read the fine print: prices shown include German/EU VAT, surcharges depend on location, and the slot-based configurator means the advertised "from" price is rarely the price at your real configuration. Build the actual config before comparing against fixed-tier hosts.

Performance & infrastructure

On Eygelshoven hardware, a modern game server (Minecraft with plugins, FiveM with resources) has headroom — EPYC 7763 cores are fast single-threaded and the NVMe Ceph cluster with triple replication is a genuinely good storage design for game worlds. The US locations are a generation behind (Sandy Bridge/Broadwell-era Xeons in Dell R720s and HP blades per ZAP's own descriptions), which is worth knowing if your players are in North America. The contradiction between the Minecraft page (Xeon E5-2650 v4) and the location page (dual EPYC 7763) is visible to customers and has not been reconciled publicly; assume the answer varies by location and product line.

Network-wise ZAP runs 10-40 Gbit/s uplinks depending on location (100 Gbit/s per system in Eygelshoven), with direct peering at major European exchanges per third-party reviews, its own RIPE IP ranges, and the PletX or aurologic filter stacks in front of everything. The live DDoS tests deserve credit — almost no host publishes its own attack footage and failure analysis — even though the first test showed real gaps.

What we cannot verify: a published uptime SLA. One third-party review asserts 99.9%, but we found no SLA page, no credit policy, and no status-page history to support it. For a host whose customers run always-on community servers, we want that documented. On backups, game servers include automated/one-click backups in the panel; retention and off-site policy are not published. We have not benchmarked ZAP hardware ourselves — for our measured results on other providers see /benchmarks — and the per-slot pricing makes performance-per-euro comparisons against VPS-style hosts awkward by design.

Where it falls short

Pricing opacity first. Per-slot pricing, RAM tied to tiers, location surcharges up to 56%, euro-vs-dollar display switching, and lifetime offers whose funding model is never explained make it genuinely hard to know whether you are getting a good deal. The mid-tier slot prices (€22.63 for 4 GB) are poor value; the RAM boost and the VPS line are where the value hides.

Then the trust questions: hardware descriptions that contradict each other across pages, no published SLA or refund policy (a review aggregator notes "no refund announced"), and community feedback that rates uptime and support speed well but complains about billing and cancellation rigidity. Small German hosts with lifetime plans have a checkered history in this market — we are not alleging anything about ZAP specifically, but we would start monthly, not with a five-year prepay.

US infrastructure is dated relative to the European flagship, the PletX protection does not cover HTTP/HTTPS traffic yet (web apps and some protocols can see false positives until support whitelists them), and there is no free tier to test with beyond paid orders.

Who should pick this

Our pick for European gaming communities — Minecraft, FiveM, Rust — who want one-click deployment, game-aware DDoS filtering that has been tested in public, and a panel that also runs their TeamSpeak and Discord bot. The Eygelshoven location with EPYC hardware and NVMe Ceph is the configuration we would choose.

We would also look at the VPS line for EU-based developers who want unmetered traffic and root at budget prices, and at dedicated boxes for buyers specifically attracted to lifetime pricing — with the monthly-first caveat above.

We would skip it for: production business workloads that need a signed SLA and compliance documentation, North American deployments where the older US hardware matters, anyone comparing on pure RAM-per-euro (the slot model loses), and buyers who need predictable billing without studying surcharge tables.

Key takeaways

• German operator (ZAP-Hosting GmbH, Münster, brand since 2010) running its own hardware, network and RIPE IP ranges — not a reseller.
• Eight locations across Europe (Eygelshoven NL, London), North America (Ashburn, Dallas, Los Angeles, Montreal) and APAC (Singapore, Sydney); the European flagship runs dual EPYC 7763 with triple-replicated NVMe Ceph.
• PletX DDoS protection (up to 4 Tbit/s filtering at Eygelshoven) is protocol-aware for game traffic and was live-tested at 1.2 Tbit/s — but does not cover HTTP/HTTPS.
• Game servers are priced per slot with RAM bundled (Minecraft: €2.76 for 4 slots/2 GB up to €72.86 for 160 slots/16 GB, incl. VAT); RAM boosts (€2.40/GB) and prepay discounts (up to -50%) shape the real price; locations add up to +56%.
• VPS (from about €2.99/month) and dedicated servers (from about $67/month, plus lifetime pay-once offers) round out the catalogue; 24/7 support across three channels.
• No published uptime SLA, contradictory hardware claims, and billing/cancellation complaints in community feedback — start monthly before committing.

Sources

• https://zap-hosting.com/en/imprint
• https://zap-hosting.com/en/dedicated-server-hosting
• https://dev.zap-hosting.com/en/server-hosting
• https://zap-hosting.com/guides/docs/ddos-protection-pletx
• https://zap-hosting.com/en/blog/2025/07/ddos-us-again-2-live-on-twitch-july-11/
• https://minecraft-hosts.com/hosts/zap-hosting
• https://gameserver.rentals/zap-hosting
• https://vpstier.com/blog/zap-hosting-vps-review-2026
• https://fivemcoach.com/blog/fivem-on-zap-hosting-review