I'm aware of one similar company that used to fit sixty $20/mo VPS in 1U. They were working on a couple hundred in 2 or 3U when I left (harder than you'd think), but they also have a cheaper tier now because of competitors pushing VPS down. Margins on VPS, even without oversubscribing RAM, are pretty decent once you get past the capital but they are decreasing in a race to the bottom just like shared hosting before it.

GCE provides significantly more reliability promises to us, from the PoV of user - As far as I know, DigitalOcean and RamNode don't provide things like no-downtime host maintenance (hell, AWS doesn't provide that)

Interestingly, the "3 cores for 1 user acing one" would explain the pricing of "preemptible" instances - which can cost as little as 1/3rd of full instance. And the main difference is that they are fully rescheduled every 24h or more often, and there's no live-migration for maintenance...

… I am now wondering if GCE runs fault-tolerant VMs. Because if it does, holy moly

Resizing a Digital Ocean VM takes me several minutes.

A GCE VM spins up in less than a minute. I've seen them come up in 20 seconds.

Except they don't. You give up reliability and uptime and not being on oversold hosts for a tiny bit more money?? So some real world benchmarks between DO and GCE. Not the same ballpark.