Ah. Of those, I've used Linode and OVH. Neither ever gave me grief for having IRC, but I also ensured that I never had botnets connecting to me, which is what most of them don't like dealing with. I've never tried 1and1, Hetzner (ive heard good things about them), HostGator or Liquidweb.

I am certain that Linode won't give you any grief as long as you make some effort to keep botnets from abusing your service.

Hi there! Disclaimer - Linode employee here.

I can't speak for the other services, but we have a very active IRC channel. I run my IRC instance off of a Linode I created just for that purpose.