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The issue isn't unplugging, I don't think anybody here thinks that it is unreasonable if they were to do this. The issue is that they kept the site unplugged for good because a single DDoS attack. My analysis based on the official response is that they used this incident as an excuse to drop the site because it was too much of a hassle to deal with the takedown notices.

It isn't an issue of expensive mitigation devices.

Even expensive and large hosts like Softlayer will null route you.

They just don't want to pay bandwidth or go through the hassle of asking their upstream providers to filter the attack for them.

"Smaller hosts" like this are imho companies that sell a service they are fundamentally unable of actually maintaining. And they are usually not very transparent about it.