[hashim]

As someone who also runs a Laravel site on DO (but doesn't use Forge so can't comment on whether it handles any additional security configurations) buying a cheap DO droplet is very much handling your own infrastructure, it comes with reasonable enough defaults for most people out of the box but if you're expecting any decent amount of traffic it definitely needs to be hardened a little more. Also other administrative tasks like adding swap space if you're like me and trying to get as much performance as possible from as little spend as possible.