Has anyone chosen digital ocean over aws/gcp/aZure when building a scalable setup (for pricing reasons). Eg setting up your own load balancers/ private master slave dB machines / bunch of ansible to organize it all.
Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.
It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.
On your point about database services, I was able to set up Postgres on my droplet with relative ease and it has been serving me well ever since, again all thanks to clear and well made tutorials. I think if I could do it without any prior experience, most other people can too. So IMO, these providers aren't necessary at all.
Eventually they were acquired by Rackspace and folded into the Cloud Servers line.
Great company though.