Best European Alternatives to AWS Shield

Why people leave AWS Shield

Most people reading this should not buy anything. Shield Standard costs nothing, is switched on for every AWS customer without being asked for, and absorbs the common network and transport layer attacks. If that is what you have and nothing has gone wrong, there is no problem here to solve.

The conversation only starts at Shield Advanced, and the first thing to correct is the price. It is quoted everywhere as $3,000 a month, and that is the subscription alone. It carries a one-year commitment, so the real floor is $36,000.

On top sit data transfer fees of $0.025 per gigabyte through CloudFront and $0.050 through Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 and Global Accelerator. And the Shield Response Team, which is the part people think they are buying, requires a Business or Enterprise support plan as well — Enterprise Support starts at $5,000 a month.

The structural point matters more than the money. Shield Advanced protects six AWS resource types: EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, Route 53 and Elastic IP addresses. It is not a service you can point at a server in a Frankfurt data centre or at an origin you run yourself. It is a feature of an estate, and it protects exactly as much of your organisation as that estate covers.

• It only defends what is already inside AWS An organisation whose public services are split between AWS and anything else — a colocated origin, a European host, an acquired company's stack — is buying protection for one half and leaving the other half as it was. Every European provider on this page sits in front of whatever your origin happens to be, because they are services rather than account features. That is not a marketing difference, it is the whole architecture.
• The quoted price is a fraction of the committed one $3,000 a month with a one-year commitment is $36,000 before a single gigabyte moves. Add $0.025 per gigabyte through CloudFront, or $0.050 through a load balancer, and a genuinely busy service adds thousands more. Then add support, because access to the Shield Response Team requires Business or Enterprise, and Enterprise Support has a $5,000 monthly floor of its own. Budget the whole stack or you will be surprised at the second invoice.
• Cost protection is insurance against a problem the billing model creates Shield Advanced includes DDoS cost protection: service credits for scaling charges caused by attack traffic on protected resources. It is a genuinely useful feature and worth understanding for what it is. AWS bills you for the traffic an attacker sends, so an attack is a financial event as well as an availability one, and the remedy is a credit you request afterwards. A provider that absorbs attack traffic without metering it to you does not generate the exposure in the first place.
• The company defending you answers to a foreign court A DDoS and firewall layer terminates TLS and inspects every request in the clear: login credentials in transit, form contents, visitor addresses and behaviour. Amazon Web Services, Inc. is in Seattle, so the entity performing that inspection is American regardless of which region your resources sit in. For a bank, a utility or a public body, who performs the inspection is part of the assessment, not a footnote to it.

What you have to replace, not just match

Work out which of the three things you are buying, because they are sold together and priced as one.

The first is absorption: enough network capacity to swallow a volumetric flood before it reaches you. The second is filtering: a web application firewall and bot management deciding which requests are legitimate, which is where application-layer attacks are actually stopped. The third is people — the Shield Response Team, engineers you can reach during an incident, and the reason many organisations buy Advanced at all.

Bunny.net and Gcore give you the first as part of delivery, at no separate charge. Gcore adds a serious share of the second across layers 3, 4 and 7. Myra Security is the only entry here that supplies all three, with its own analysts filling the role the Shield Response Team plays, and it is the reason it ranks first on this page.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to AWS Shield

What actually breaks when you switch

Locking the origin down is the step people get wrong. Once a European provider is the public endpoint, your AWS resources must refuse everything else, or an attacker who finds the load balancer address simply goes around the protection. Security group rules restricted to the provider's published address ranges, checked from outside, are the difference between a filter and a suggestion.

The rule set does not come with you. WAF rules, rate limits, geographic blocks and bot policies written against AWS WAF encode years of specific decisions about your own traffic, and there is no export path into another vendor's format. With a managed provider that rebuilding is part of onboarding; self-serve, it is your work and it is the part most likely to be done in a hurry and left half-finished.

And plan for the egress you are about to start paying. A protection layer outside AWS pulls from an AWS origin over the public internet, so Amazon bills standard data transfer out on traffic that previously stayed inside the account. For a well-cached site that is small; for a dynamic application where most requests reach the origin, price it before you commit, because it can quietly exceed what you were paying for Shield.

Do we need Shield Advanced at all?

Probably not. Shield Standard already defends every AWS customer against the common network and transport layer floods, and it is included. The honest test is whether anyone can name an incident where Standard was insufficient, or whether a regulator, an insurer or a customer contract requires a documented mitigation service.

Where Advanced earns its money is a narrow set of cases: a service whose outage is a public event, an organisation facing targeted application-layer attacks, or one that has already been hit and needs a response team on retainer. If none of those describe you, the subscription is $36,000 a year for a feeling.

The other reason people buy it is cost protection — insurance against the bill an attack generates. That is a real concern on AWS and a smaller one elsewhere, because it exists in the first place only because attack traffic is metered to you.

What does Shield Advanced actually cost once everything is counted?

The subscription is $3,000 a month with a one-year commitment, which is $36,000 before usage. Data transfer on protected resources is $0.025 per gigabyte through CloudFront and $0.050 through Elastic Load Balancing, EC2 and Global Accelerator, so a service moving fifty terabytes a month through a load balancer adds substantially to that.

Then there is support. The Shield Response Team is available to customers on Business or Enterprise support plans, so if you are on Basic today you need to add one. Business Support+ is the greater of $29 a month or a percentage of your AWS charges that starts at nine per cent; Enterprise Support starts at $5,000 a month.

For a mid-sized AWS estate the realistic annual figure is well north of $50,000. That is not an argument against buying it, but it is the number to compare against a European quote, not the $3,000 headline.

Can Shield protect something that is not in AWS?

No. The protected resource types are EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront distributions, Global Accelerator, Route 53 and Elastic IP addresses. There is no configuration that points Shield at an origin you host yourself or at a server with another provider.

That is the single clearest structural difference on this page. A reverse-proxy DDoS service — which is what Myra, Gcore and Bunny.net all are — sits in front of whatever answers on your domain, so the origin can be a rack in Frankfurt, a European host or another cloud entirely.

For organisations mid-migration, or with an estate assembled through acquisitions, this usually decides the question on its own. Protection that stops at the edge of one account is not protection of the organisation.

Is a CDN's included DDoS protection good enough to replace this?

For Shield Standard, yes, and comfortably. Bunny.net and Gcore absorb volumetric attacks across their networks as part of delivery, with no separate subscription and no commitment. A site that would have been fine on Standard is fine on either.

For Shield Advanced, no, and it would be dishonest to say otherwise. What Advanced adds is application-layer protection with a managed rule set, automatic mitigation tuned to your traffic, and a response team. Gcore mitigates at layers 3, 4 and 7 and gets part of the way; Bunny.net is CDN-grade protection rather than a managed security service, and its own positioning does not claim more.

If the requirement is genuinely at the Advanced level, Myra Security is the entry on this page that meets it, and it is quoted and staffed accordingly.

Which one to pick

If all you have is Shield Standard and nothing has gone wrong, the honest recommendation is to change nothing on security grounds alone. Move it when you move the thing it is protecting, and Bunny.net or Gcore will cover the same ground in front of a European origin.

If you are paying for Shield Advanced and your estate is not entirely inside AWS, you are buying partial protection at a $36,000 floor. Myra Security covers the whole organisation, and for a regulated one its BSI certification answers a question no American supplier can.

If you need genuine layer 7 filtering but the Advanced subscription cannot be justified, Gcore occupies the ground AWS leaves empty: a free tier to test on, €25 plans, and mitigation across all three layers without a year's commitment.

And if you are on Shield Advanced because a regulator, an insurer or a major customer requires a named mitigation service with people behind it, that requirement is legitimate and a cheaper CDN does not satisfy it. Replace it with another managed service, not with a cache.