For many personal uses something like AWS is a bit too sophisticated when you just want to spin us some instances and have a clean interface with little noise.
I say this having used DO since... 2012?
[0] They never got back to me, sadly.
$ uptime
16:06:14 up 2802 days, 15:03, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
$ uname -a
Linux myinstance 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I've run production setups on DO for 12 or 13 years now though. My last company, after it was acquired, was forced into Azure. Both stability and performance tanked, while spending a little over 2x compared to what it was in DO.
Based on DO's monthly newsletters, all it cares about anymore is AI.
I don't think its written a single bullet point in two years that wasn't about AI.
It's as if some wave of amnesia came over DO and it forgot it has thousands of existing customers who are not AI wantrapreneurs.
I'd say that for most businesses 3-4 VMs, or a couple of bare metal boxes, is already enough, unless they grow explosively.
After about 5 years, I called to shutdown my last Cobalt server. A week later, they called to ask if they could ship me server. No Cost
Turns out it was the last of the Colbalt RAQs and the oldest server in their fleet
I'm subscribed to the DO newsletter; let me skim the archive. What they introduced in the last couple of years was: per-second billing, various identity providers for their SSO, managed Postgres upgrades, storage autoscaling, a NAT gateway, "bring your ow IP", etc. Yes, they do actively build out their GPU offerings, and access to open-weight models, but it's by far not the only thing.
DigitalOcean newsletter for March 20,2026:
- Deploy 2026: The Production Inference Era
- DigitalOcean at NVIDIA GTC 2026: Building the AI Factory for the Agentic Era
- The Proven Home for AI Agents
- The Richmond Data Center: Our newest facility engineered exclusively for AI, featuring NVIDIA HGX B300 systems and a 400 Gbps non-blocking RDMA fabric.
- Frictionless NVIDIA Partnership
- Expanded Model Catalog
- 1 click NemoClaw (Alpha) Droplet
- Network File Storage standard tier and expanded availability
7 AI items. One non-AI item. I stand by my comment.
That early access privilege, economies of scale, and access to cash flow or capital paints a somewhat dire picture for DO even ignoring "AI", although the AI boom has made physical infrastructure much more difficult to do at scale if you aren't already doing physical infra at scale.
Still an awesome service and platform.. but no longer worth it price wise as it once was. Same with Vultr..
I guess at some point all investors just pressure these companies into price matching AWS and other pay-for-every-single-thing-ever companies.
They were very debt heavy before the AI boom, and are just going to make it worst because I'm assuming they aren't raising 800m to pay of that debt.
You should definitely take that into account if you are or plan on using them.
This is not a well ran company.
It looks like they paused hiring for some number of weeks after the law was passed, probably because someone forgot to update the job listings and run interference on the salaries.
That's what you're upset about?
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/digitalocean-pauses-hiring-i...
I feel that even if you're not required to post it, the fact that you don't post it means you're underpaying.
We’ve had integration partners actually move off them because we won’t allow connections.
Regardless, I believe you can provision VPS on Hetzner Cloud via their API.