I don't just pay DO for servers, I'm paying them for a cohesive integrated UX, decent support (for the price), and nice hosted database and load balancer options. That's always been what separates DO from the rest of the market. Servers are cheaper elsewhere, that extra stuff is all pretty competitively priced.
All of those things are subject to the prices of people, which are nuts right now.
I also have deployments at hetzner and OVH and the management angle is day and night (although Hetzner is almost there now). Multiple different logins and dashboards by product, country, etc.
I'm sure some of it is just driven by being public as well. I'll keep paying them if they can keep those other factors great, but little things like wasting my time on the pricing table above are damaging the one thing that I really like about DO.
I’m not saying you don’t - but my experience has been different. In my experience Linode has customer service that is in a different league than DigitalOcean has ever provided. I’ve never gotten what I would call great, or perhaps memorably good, customer service from DigitalOcean. I haven’t gotten awful customer service either. It’s the kind I would expect from any turn key solution that doesn’t employ support agents who are already well versed in what they’re working on.
All of those things are subject to the prices of people, which are nuts right now.
I also have deployments at hetzner and OVH and the management angle is day and night (although Hetzner is almost there now). Multiple different logins and dashboards by product, country, etc.
I'm sure some of it is just driven by being public as well. I'll keep paying them if they can keep those other factors great, but little things like wasting my time on the pricing table above are damaging the one thing that I really like about DO.