It wasn't just Linode (a provider that's generally much cheaper than OVH), but high end providers like Softlayer too (and, as far as I know, still are)
SoftLayer, now IBM Cloud, does not provide “DDOS Protection”. Their filtering service is only up to a certain amount, iirc max 5.5 Gbit or something like that. It is absolute trash and pretty much kills all traffic legitimate or not. If you’re filtered for more than 6-8 hours, they will just nullroute the IP. I’ve had the misfortune of hitting this every few months and it’s a major headache. If they remove you from the nullroute, and you land back on it, they won’t remove you again for 24 hours. A few months ago we hit a bug with their detection where it considered outbound to be the same as inbound, and produced some wildly off base numbers that made no sense. We’re not a small account, I’d say medium sized probably at this point, but I wanted to hop a plane to Dallas and strangle the techs there. It’s really gone downhill since IBM acquired them, and I dread to see how Red Hat fares...
If you ask for any estimated traffic size so you can go to a service that does do filtering for a living, they won’t give you that stating “nobody does”. It took a lot of time getting numbers out of them, and that finally finding a top level employee through our account manager was what led to them going “oh yikes, yeah something is off.” Sigh.
Linode's origin is as a VPS provider. OVH's is as a dedicated server provider. OVH's top server is twice the cost of Linode's and their cheapest is 5x the price (10 vs ~50).
Cheapest OVH dedi I see is the KS-1 for 3.99eur, which is less than the cheapest Linode VPS. OVH also doesn’t try to nickel-and-dime you by charging for data transfer.
I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest Kimsufi offerings though, something like the SYS-WS-1 goes for $33 and is easily comparable with Linode offerings priced at multiple times that.
OVH has a VPS product that’s far cheaper than what Linode offers, but I can’t speak to the quality of that offering.
If you ask for any estimated traffic size so you can go to a service that does do filtering for a living, they won’t give you that stating “nobody does”. It took a lot of time getting numbers out of them, and that finally finding a top level employee through our account manager was what led to them going “oh yikes, yeah something is off.” Sigh.