DO's spaces didn't even work for the most basic test of putting a few images on a page when I tried it. I couldn't say it's comparable to S3.

I use DO spaces heavily - for images no less. It works great. What issues did you have?

Uploaded about 100 images. Put those images on a page. 50% of them timed out when downloading. Maybe I was just unlucky, but it was a good way to make me instantly lose all confidence DO Spaces. S3 and Backblaze B2 worked fine for the same thing at the same time as when this happened.

That's definitely incorrect behavior. Did you reach out to support?

Something tells me you are doing something wrong.

Which raises my question: Is there some open source github project that lets you create an S3 API compatible with underlying heterogeneous VPS hosts clustered? I'm guessing even with this storage would still be expensive, so how does Backblaze pull this off?

Yes, several. Minio is the big one but I believe Ceph can do this too. Others exist.

Disk is cheap. Real cheap.

ah yes minio! the one issue i have with using VPS for production is, are they hardened? or is it enough just with proper unix user management and UFW? I have this fear that the VPS box has attack surfaces or zero day vulnerabilities but when I am on the cloud I do not have this worry.

Perhaps irrational but can't argue with the peace of mind that expensive clouds offer. Although we've seen misconfigured S3 buckets leaking data so.

What makes you believe the threat model for AWS is different than DO? They are just VMs at the end of the day.