Can I ask when you moved off of soft layer? I ask because my employer is considering them as an option and this isn't the first time I've heard softlayer horror stories.
We have been working on a POC in AWS and it's such a breath of fresh air. Things work as advertised, the provisioning process is quick and everything can easily be done with an API call. No more waiting for support tickets. The freedom you get with your network routing in an AWS VPC is worth it to me.
At the risk of sounding too much like an AWS fanboy we are actually looking at scrapping it all and just bringing everything in-house running on our own physical boxes with some type of hypervisor on top.
We have done just that, with Opennebula (qemu,kvm; networking built on top of openvswitch and storage from distributed iSCSI NAS appliances). It's a perfect middle ground. All the easy provisioning niceness, less than half the price of AWS.