Their homepage even says "The simplest cloud platform for developers & teams". Their goal is simplicity, not bleeding edge.

and that's just one of the many reasons they're so awesome.

Were they ever 'new' in anything? I use them for small personal projects (they've gotten a lot more stable recently). I never thought of them as an innovative cloud provider but just one that was cheap and easy.

Same here. IME, DO is a great choice for many projects, because it's inexpensive, straightforward and reliable. I wouldn't trade any of those 3 attributes for "innovative".

You remember a few years back when "performance is a feature"?

Well, sanity is also a feature. When none of your competitors are doing it, then it starts to look like innovation.

I mean, the transparent fee structure alone is why I push dabblers toward DO. I'm looking at you, AWS.

To me they are closer to the classic hosting companies, the ones where you can get a "Virtual Private Server" for $20/month rather than "Some Ether" for $0.0000001 / weird unit.

There was a window where they were a nice option for small SSD backed instances when EC2 was still doing low performance spinning disks for their bottom tier.

first only ssd host.

Like many others, I'm not sure DO's USP is being at the cutting edge. I like them because I get a decent amount of control, I have found their support to be quite responsive, and their products have always been very stable for me.

Offering these things without exorbitant egress charges is 'new' enough for me.

This ^^ just price the bandwith DO throughs with the instances at AWS prices. Plus I know exactly what my bill will be next month :)

Echoing @gtf21 and @chrisweekly: in short, us taking out the complexity in using and scaling with cloud capabilities and making learning easy for all developers has been our innovation. We don't always have to be the first to launch to add value to millions of developers around the world :)

Ya'll have the best tutorials and guides around, I've gone from embedded C Dev to full stack, and DO's guides have helped immensely.

I'm working on migrating a large part of my stack over to DO, and I'll be much happier when I'm done! :)