Is this DO specific? Aren't there other hosting providers with competitive rates, or is there something about DO that makes it especially good for this sort of thing?
What DO has is some of the best content marketing around (great tutorials on server stuff) and scale. The first attacts beginners (which includes most of the spammers and hackers), the second puts them on people's radar.
it's very, very, very simple to use.
some people can't even navigate AWS or GCP, not to mention that the pricing is unclear as it can be. for people learning by practice it's a nightmare.
Then again I'm sure there's no incentive to improve it, since if for whatever reason you were laid off from AWS... you could have a lucrative consulting gig the next day helping people with the blindingly obvious consumer pain points you refused to resolve.
> "Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book."
If you want to see pieces as you do stuff you can go to the Google Cloud