You guys aren't missing anything. The server is laggy as fuck, like I'm talking about you can barely move lag. I get that they're waiting for the month to end so the money they paid the host isn't wasted, but this is absolutely not worth it at all, sorry.
That host should be giving them a refund with this lag in the first place, official shell server hosts are supposed to have DoS protection. I've never seen a host affected by little pricks trying to DoS on Byond, it's not even legit enough to call it DDoS, there's probably a few people doing the DoS.
Sadly not every shell server will have ddos protection, the ones that do however are pretty expensive.
That host should be giving them a refund with this lag in the first place, official shell server hosts are supposed to have DoS protection. I've never seen a host affected by little pricks trying to DoS on Byond, it's not even legit enough to call it DDoS, there's probably a few people doing the DoS.