To put it pretty bluntly: you were off the rails at "getting a VPS from provider X doesn't mean that they will". You're talking in terms of not having a custom

To put it pretty bluntly: you were off the rails at "getting a VPS from provider X doesn't mean that they will". You're talking in terms of not having a custom kernel, and that's just the wrong layer of abstraction if we're talking about "cloud"; this whole discussion is really about VM and colo levels of abstraction anyway ("Cloud" advice would be "Just use your vendor's S3 blobstore"). Base Ubuntu has xfs support. If your VPS provider won't run plain old Ubuntu with some cloudinit stuff, get a new VPS provider.