[webnanners]

I agree with shaggy. I don't know how you would expect to have a VPN accessible only by your account's droplets for $5. A private network means an internal network. So it's just using the internal infrastructure of the data center to communicate with other droplets in the data center. It's more performant than using the external network. Usually companies' advertise a fully private account infrastructure as a "Private Cloud" or something of that nature.

[sneak]

You would expect it because it has "private" in the name and because words mean things.

The "you should have known they were lying because $5 is obviously too cheap to provide the service they are claiming" argument doesn't hold water.

[webnanners]

"Private Network" is often analogous with "Internal Network". They aren't lying,it's private as in it's using private IP assignment within their own infrastructure. Thus, private.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network

This is purely a case of not knowing industry terminology.