We're focused on delivering a simplified cloud experience, if you want to run a bunch of $5 and $10 droplets then by all means go for it =]

But we're serious about building a feature rich cloud so that you can run all of your production systems from DO.

We run DO from DO itself, so as we continue to scale we will continue to release products and features that will make it easier to do so, both for ourselves and for our customers.

The biggest advantage even for low-end services would be high-availability. If one server goes down you can automatically fail over to another without having to build that into your code.

Does someone running a wordpress site need HA though? You could also just buy a pingdom account and be notified when there is a problem and resolve it via support as needed. Adding an LB tier is adding a layer of complexity and different failure modes. That's why I was asking if maybe they were targeting larger customers now.

I think you're a little off on the idea that DO only hosts unimportant Wordpress sites, or that Wordpress could never be used for something that needs high availability.

As of 2014 Digital Ocean was the third largest hosting provider, so they're not a mom-and-pop operation.

I never said or implied that the company was a mom-and-pop operation. I know they are a large company.

Being the 3rd largest hosting provider however doesn't say anything about what type and size of customers they have.

Who are some the larger customers that run their businesses on D.O infra?

You might want to take a look at https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/ and/or https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/

The only names I recognized on there was Influx and Compose.

Influx actually looks like they use AWS for their cloud offering now:

https://www.influxdata.com/announcing-influxcloud-fully-mana...

and Compose deploys to AWS, Google, Softlayer and only to D.O for MongoDB classic whatever that is:

https://www.compose.com/mongodb

Digital Ocean supports droplets up to 224GB of RAM, 32 virtual CPUs, 500GB of SSD storage for $1680 a month in their High Memory variants. So there are likely some folks running larger apps across multiple virtual hosts.

I would be curios to hear what the distribution of those sized instances vs the $5.00 droplets is.