Articles on: Minecraft

How to Use TCPShield for a Minecraft Server

TCPShield is a service that provides DDOS protection for your servers. Us here at SparkedHost highly recommend TCPShield for servers big and small as it as a amazing tool in order to protect your servers.


Creating network and configuring backends


  1. First of all go to TCPShield and create a free account.
  2. Once in the panel click create "Add Network" then enter your networks name
  3. Navigate to Backends Then Click "Add Set"
  4. Set the Name to anything you like for example "Main" or "Production". The "Backends" is your IP address to your server

    In the example of SparkedHost, I am running two BungeeCords I want to load balance between, so I'm going to add the IP/port combination for both of those instances (1.1.1.1:25565, 1.2.3.4:25565).

    Click save.
Note: I did not add anything related to my spigot servers here. ONLY the thing accepting the connection from the TCPShield network should be listed here. If you want to have just a single spigot instance, you would point directly to that.


Configure the domain and add records


  1. First, navigate to the domains page and click "Add Domain" at bottom of the page.
  2. My domain is sparkedhost.com, which I will insert into the modal. I will then click the dropdown for the backend set and use the one we just created.
Badlion Proxy is an optional step that is specific for users of Badlion AntiCheat. This is not something required for most networks.


Then, click "Begin verification"


Domain Verification


Domain verification is the process we require for all domains on the TCPShield network. This confirms ownership of the domain using DNS and is required for security reasons. We recommend when you verify your domain, you use TXT records.



  1. I will copy the TXT record and insert it on the root(required) of my domain on Cloudflare DNS manager.


Once my domain is saved, you can attempt to verify the domain on the TCPShield panel.


This process can unfortunately can take sometimes up to several hours for DNS to fully propagate to where Cloudflare (our internal resolver) will see it. This is why we highly recommend everyone use Cloudflare for DNS management. This process often trips up many people, so before contacting us, we would encourage to double check that the TXT record has properly propagated worldwide using this page: whatsmydns


As a general note, from our observations Namecheap DNS takes the longest with an average time of 5 hours.---


Point Domains and DNS


Now that we have verified the domain with TCPShield, we need to decide how we want players to connect to our network. Often, owners want players to only join with a subdomain like play.sparkedhost.com. Other times, owners would like the ability for both players to join with play.sparkedhost.com sparkedhost.com but still allow a website to exist with an A record.


I want my server to allow people to join through sparkedhost.com, so I will set this accordingly in the hostname field on the domain page. TCPShield domains are wildcarded, so we do not need to add another record for play.sparkedhost.com


Install the TCPShield Plugin


  1. On the same domain page, you can find the link to download the plugin for BungeeCord, Velocity and Spigot.
Click here to download it directly!
  1. Login to the server in our apollo panel where we will install the TCPShield plugin and we shut down the server.
Note: We will need a dedicated IP 25565 on the bungeecord server, you can follow this article to acquire one. If you are a spigot server forget this.
  1. Navigate to the server files, and click on the server plugins folder.
  2. Upload the plugin that we downloaded from the TCPShield Github page.


Turn on your server and that's it, we will have our TCPShield setup and installation done and working properly.


Note: If you are running a BungeeCord server, you only need the Real IP plugin on your BungeeCord instances.


Note: If you are running Lilypad (while not recommended), you will need to contact us for a way to get the correct IP addresses for your players. This is a limitation of Lilypad (No plugins), not TCPShield.


If you require any further assistance, please create a ticket here.


Created By: Steven C.

Updated on: 02/04/2025

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