serferfish

My old laptop offers much better price/performance, especially when I use free wifi in coffee shops for bandwidth. The laptop is already paid for so I only pay for the electricity (on days when I don't plug it into the wall at a friend's place to save even more). Those prices are just too expensive. There's always a place willing to do a job cheaper...

Check out http://www.cloudharmony.com/benchmarks for something with more current data.

Unixbench is a pretty awful benchmark unless the only thing you care about is disk IO (unlikely for a typical web app). The site you linked to doesn't even have data for AWS t2 instances types, so not really a useful data point for your comparison. The site only has data for instance types listed as "previous generation instances".

Digitalocean is silly expensive. Why don't you look at Atlantic.net they are so awesome and charge way less than overpriced digitalocean. Why not run it on your laptop which you've already paid for, that would be even cheaper than overpriced atlantic.net!