Fwiw, Digital Ocean keeps adding more and more options on the service front. Several storage options, load balancers w/ Let's Encrypt built in, etc.

Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.

It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.

FWIW, I have found one of the best parts of using Digital Ocean is their fantastic documentation and tutorials. As a relative newbie, I was encouraged to deploy to a PaaS such as Heroku but grew frustrated at the black box aspect of what was going on underneath the hood. The tutorials on DO allowed me to learn and gain an understanding of how servers really work.

On your point about database services, I was able to set up Postgres on my droplet with relative ease and it has been serving me well ever since, again all thanks to clear and well made tutorials. I think if I could do it without any prior experience, most other people can too. So IMO, these providers aren't necessary at all.

Oh, I totally agree. That's actually how I learned this stuff. Years ago there was a company called Slicehost that was very similar to what Digital Ocean is now. It had a treasure trove of great documentation and articles.

Eventually they were acquired by Rackspace and folded into the Cloud Servers line.

Great company though.

Lack of GPU droplets is also a big gap, and something that has been promised for several years now.

Yes. We are using DO over AWS. Our bill is $120/month. We serve 21m web requests per month for that amount.

possible to share analysis of what the equivalent would've cost in infrastructure on AWS/GCP/Azure?

I havent had the time to do it. I will try to in the upcomjng week

yes I've done that - been pretty happy so far.