I sympathize with the provider here, if the systems weren't designed to take the heat, do they continue trying to defend (at the risk of the other 1.5 mil) when

I sympathize with the provider here, if the systems weren't designed to take the heat, do they continue trying to defend (at the risk of the other 1.5 mil) when they believed they couldn't keep everything online, or discuss with the user how to put their domain somewhere with more resources to defend against this kind of attack? Any small company would do the same (hosting etc) to stop everything going offline. You can't blame name.com for being overwhelmed, because this sounds like a DDoS from an organized group who knew what they were doing, which is quite hard to mitigate against.