[eropple]

At the cost of significantly worse networking (VPC is fantastic), no object storage mechanism, no equivalent to IAM for instance permissioning, and no autoscaling (seriously? in 2016? I had to go look to make sure I wasn't misremembering--that they recommend something like DOProxy should make the lot of them faintly embarrassed).

DigitalOcean may have some value at the basement level of compute, but as a professional in this area there is literally no situation where I would use DigitalOcean right now because I value my time. AWS is already laughably cheap, the tooling is overwhelmingly superior, the resources available are better, and you aren't duct-taping together half-solutions and reinventing every wheel. (This is less an endorsement of AWS and more an endorsement of Not DigitalOcean; GCE is more than fine, Azure has some ugly bits around autoscaling that I don't like but you can get by.)