Latency was an absolute disaster even typing characters via SSH was horribly slow.
The management platform was hilariously bad (they where still sending me notification emails about 9mths after I cancelled).
We went back to linode for everything after that, for our needs it hits the sweet spot between cost and reliability (back then DO was new and had it's own issues, largely due to a flaky network).
Now I'd possibly consider DO for compute or job servers but I think I'd still use Linode for anything that wasn't running on my own hardware, I've been a customer with them for something like 6 years and they've never let me down.
I've used Hetzner for 2 years now for a lot for personal projects, and I do get slowish SSH sometimes, but that's what Mosh is for. Also, it's much better for European customers than for US ones.
They are also the only service I can afford for personal projects that requires a lot of RAM. Basically, any machine learning with a ton of features.
Here's a test with latency:
URL tested: http://rerecommender.com
Test performed from: New York, NY
Test performed at: 2015-12-18 04:36:44 (GMT +00:00)
Resolved As: 188.40.128.87
Status: OK
Response Time: 0.306 sec
DNS: 0.075 sec
Connect: 0.115 sec
Redirect: 0.000 sec
First byte: 0.116 sec
Last byte: 0.001 sec
Size: 7688 bytesSo some Chinese residents buy the servers to spam others and then they have to clear blacklists for their server IPs?