I think you're right. The sense I got was that it's not up to the hosting provider. Linode were actually totally cool with me running one (I reached out to them ahead of time), however they got served a notice by some automated intrustion report system and just forwarded it to me. It was all very above board, but it still sucks that they made me shut it down since ISP data collection is at an all time high.

I did most of the things here https://blog.torproject.org/tips-running-exit-node/ Maybe I'll try again and do 100% of those things instead of 80% to see if that makes a difference.