No other host has grown faster than amazon, so it probably is a great thing. The reason DigitalOcean can continue the fast growth is in a strong part due to the community it has built. DigitalOcean is an unmanaged service that provides a vast amount of educational resources to its users: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ The DigitalOcean community is comprised of its articles, a question section, and an IRC channel. The difference between DigitalOcean and other "hosters", is that DigtalOcean, as an unmanaged host, has set up an ecosystem that allows the users themselves to set up, scale, and maintain their servers.