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.

How is Linode “much cheaper than OVH”? Their margins are probably way higher.