You get root on the droplet, so I'm pretty sure you can install whatever you want. I run a couple of rails apps on a 512mb droplet and it works great. Very low traffic on my sites.

Thanks for the info. My site also has low traffic. The site sucks up lot of CPU and Memory during processing and large DB tables. It is primarily data analytics driven and does lot of dM/ML work. I will try out DO.

Well it's a VPS so you can do anything that's technically possible.

And when you create a new droplet when choosing the image there's an "application" tab (or something similar) that has an option for a LAMP stack, though from what I remember it's still in beta.

DigitalOcean is nothing special, don't know why they get so much hype.

Droplets are just another marketing gimmick, another layer of abstraction which developers don't really need.

If you want a bare box to play with, try the companies at LowEndBox.com.

It's not hype. They are cheap ($5/m), reasonably reliable, and trusted. I can't say I'd trust most of the companies on Low End Box.

Disclaimer: I have droplets with DigitalOcean in SF datacenter. I've experienced the occasional network issue, but its generally a quite stable network.