I recently switched to Hetzner Cloud, which offers significantly more at lower prices. For about $2.50 you get about the equivalent of a $10 droplet. Only downside I can think of is that they don't have servers in the US (AFAIK) and I think they don't have a DNS panel.

I've moved to Hetzner from DO as well. It's cheaper than digital ocean.

However,

- They have two data center locations, both in Germany, which might be good or bad depending on how view the laws.

- Their web interface looks good too, but doesn't have the features that DO provides.

- Depending on what option you pick, some have commodity hardware (No ECC RAM, i7 processors instead of server hardware).

- [Rumor]I've heard that they are very hands off, and will take down your instance much more aggressively. As someone on reddit put it, "If Disney was a cloud provider, anything Disney won't be comfortable to host, Hetzner won't."

I use Hetzner for one of my NTP servers which handles traffic for pool.ntp.org. It's rock-solid and has no problem with latency.

I had a DO NTP server for a brief time, but the latency was all over the map, so much so that it was continually pulled out of rotation by the pool. I wasn't sure if my VM happened to be on an oversubscribed host or maybe the network to that datacenter was oversubscribed, but in either case my NTP server wasn't usable, so I decommissioned my DO server.

According to their FAQ, they are working on it:

> Will you add additional locations in different geographic regions?

> We are actively looking into this option right now.

I may have to check my droplets... do you know if the upgrades automatic by chance?

I don't believe it's automatic. I had 2 512 mb servers and 1 GB server going and none had increased specs automatically.