If you need something low-cost and dedicated try their SoYouStart range, which is just their last-generation hardware. Going from a VPS to SYS is a huge performance jump for minimal cost. They have a higher guaranteed minimum bandwidth throughput than the VPSs and may get you better support possibilities. Cost is similar to a mid-size VPS.
"After looking into the matter, it would seem that our VPS do not have a profile that would accomodate your traffic spikes. However should you switch to a dedicated server, we would be able to apply a a custom profile to your server that we better suit your needs.
Our Kimsufi server are extremely affordable and do not cost much more then what you are presently paying. However they do have limitation, among other things, you cannot order additional IPs on the server. I would advise you to think carefully before purchasing such a server.
Another alternative would be to move to our mid range server, our Soyoustart servers, which offer many of the same benefits as our OVH dedicated servers, however at a very competitive price."
Be careful using services like game servers or VOIP or anything else using UDP though, since UDP is subject to much more stringent filtering at OVH and may get affected during mitigation.
On iWeb, however, they null-routed us for half a day.
The main issue is that I lost a bit of faith in their support and reliability. vracks going down for hours with no updates. Connectivity issues. Servers disappearing.
Besides that, their DDoS protection works well for l3 attacks, except that they force a TCP reset on every connection. So if you are picky about extra connect times and having your clients re-establish their connections, they are great.
I don't know what to make of the bad reviews you found, my personal experience has been great for several years now. Multiple products used, the occasional support ticket with quick response, and decent pricing.
Anecdote: I had my dedicated server suddenly go down because it overheated. Wouldn't come back to life. Two days after submitting a ticket and getting no input, the machine suddenly came back up without any explanation. A day later, I got a mail saying the motherboard was broken and got replaced. Overall it was a very unpleasant experience, but it's to be expected given the low price of Kimsufi.
It's good to know that this stuff happens with OVH. I'll make sure to stay far from them.
This thing happens with Kimsufi servers, a side brand of OVH for cheap dedicated servers. The real OVH servers are more expensive, but you get all the bells and whisles that come with a professional server hosting offer.
We've had very few hardware-related issues, a disk failing or a motherboard to be replaced. In all of those cases, the component were swapped promptly and we've been kept informed of the progress.
Where we're unhappy is with the network, especially with their vRack offering. Looking back at our production incidents of the past 6 months, about 50% of them were caused by some vRack problem where at the same time the public interfaces were up and running just fine.
We're generally happy with customer service, but we pay for VIP support and we speak French to OVH's support agents (I believe that the latter helps a lot).
OVH include DDOS protection by default[0] and they have a very robust backbone network[1] in Europe and North America that they own and operate themselves (this is how & why anti-DDOS is standard with them).
For quick side-projects I still fire up a DigitalOcean instance or two because their UX is so slick and easy. If I needed huge scale and price didn't matter I would probably go with AWS (their 'anti-DDOS' is their vast bandwidth + your ability to pay for it during an attack). For everything else, I put it on OVH.
[0]https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/
[1]http://weathermap.ovh.net/