* didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far
If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.
$10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth.
$10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.
Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month.
DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD
AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD
I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.
The last time I checked Lightsail uses similar CPU credits[0] as their t2 ec2 instances.
As long as you're only using a tiny portion of your CPU it's fine but if you start doing work on your instance where your CPU is being used for a sustained amount of time then you run out of CPU credits and performance is drastically degraded.
DigitalOcean has no such mechanism. I've never had a droplet's CPU performance get penalized because I used the allocated resources that I was paying for.
[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...
From what I've seen of benchmarks online, DO's droplets have better sustained (and often overall) performance than Lightsail, and this looks to be the reason why.
(Which isn't to say people should avoid Lightsail, but I don't think Lightsail is the obvious 1:1 replacement for DO that a couple of people in this thread want it to be. Lightsail intentionally restricts various things to avoid cannibalizing their normal AWS sales.)