Except for the fact Digital Ocean doesn't take security seriously at all. It's good for testing small projects but to run a business on, no thanks. DO has a very small fraction of the features available that AWS does.
And DigitalOcean doesn't have ELBs, or S3, or DNS service checks. Need I go on? Digital Ocean is good for small projects, cheap projects, or anything where you only need semi-reliable compute power.
A motorbike is faster and cheaper than a car, but you can't use it to carry as many people. Or cargo. Or protect you from the elements.
If you're looker for cheaper and faster then http://ramnode.com/ is the VPS you want.
wow, so here we are at the bottom of the page, below the grayed-out guy, but heh, ramnode looks cool - $2 per month!!! That's perfect for goof-off domains, silly projects, sandboxes and whatnot. Thanks!
I've been using them for backup DNS. Great uptime, fast seeks, and I only need enough RAM for NSD to cache my zonefiles.
Looking to move more serious projects on, but we'll see.
DO is not an alternative to AWS, it is an alternative to EC2. If you want to tell people not to use AWS, you have to provide an alternative to AWS. Even google's AWS-like offering is missing tons of things lots of AWS customers rely on.
Windows Azure, but it doesn't offer everything AWS has (though it does offer some stuff AWS doesn't have).