r5sec5cyl
1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues)
2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation
3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors
4. Tier 3/4 redundancies
5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services)
6. No setup fee on new instances
7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource)
8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images
9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph
10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10
While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail.