in the case where the attack is larger than your provider's pipe, they can't "just deal with it" - I mean, without blackholing the target IP address. If your transit ports are full, you are dropping packets. Undoubtedly, this is an advantage that larger providers (like amazon) have. On the other hand, most VPS customers would not want to pay $0.13 per gigabyte for DoS traffic.

>Also, null-routing for 24 hours regardless of if the attack only lasted 2 minutes, is a little silly.

It is a rather big deal for a hosting provider to lose connectivity for two minutes.