Ways to hide a VPS's IP address + better DDoS protection

Hi everyone!

I recently purchased a powerful VPS to host a few services I've been working on (currently still not planning on load balancing VPNs and such because the scope is still small, even thought they would partly solve the problem) . I've been wanting to do 2 things:

A. better hide my VPS's IP address

B. get better ddos protection. my provider supposedly provides DDoS protection, however, I don't really trust them.

With those 2 things in mind, and with the fact that I'm not looking to spend an extra 50$ on ddos protection and since I'm planning to do more than just host a web server (which pretty much eliminates services like Cloudflare), I've been looking at alternative ways.

More specifically, I've been thinking of buying a less-powerful VPS from another VPS company (which provides good DDoS protection, such as OVH. If you know any other good ones, please do tell!) in the same area with a good latency between both data centers, and use it as a gateway/proxy server and point my domain name to the new VPS. That's good and all, but I've been struggling with deciding on which way I should do the actual tunneling - I've come up with the following solutions so far:

• Set up a VPN on the second VPS
• GRE tunneling
• SSH tunneling (SOCKS?)- for some reason I think it might not be a reliable way, but feel free to correct me
• Suggestions?

I would love to hear your opinion on each one of the methods and why one might be better than the other (or, if you've got more ways to tunnel that you can suggest, please do, I'd love the info!).

Thanks in advance!