> Digital Ocean had very little to do with their decline.

From my personal experience, Digital Ocean did pull away a lot of indie devs and small businesses away from Rackspace. Those folks did not need most of the features of AWS. They just needed simple cloud servers and maybe some load balancers.

My own small business used Rackspace in 2010 to 2013 ($5k per month op cost). When DO came to our radar, it was dead simple to switch to and cut the cost almost by half.

Another thing I remember about DO was their abundance of community articles (HowTo's and server setup tips, etc...) that were well-maintained and always kept up-to-date with latest linux distros.