Digital Ocean is just a simple VPS provider - I wouldn't even call it cloud.
The usual cPanel PHP 5.4 shared hosting is consistently unreliable, insecure and a generally overall bad idea. Who would you actually even trust to run it?
Your qualifier there made me laugh so hard because it's so true for all kinds of sysadmin-y reasons. Flashbacks of talking down a VP who said "just put it on DO or something" came to mind immediately.
Not sure I follow that ontology as that doesn't necessarily make something a cloud. API's to interact with the ecosystem make it more like a cloud.
Whilst I understand DO have API's, just saying the machine can be dynamically resized doesn't justify the cloud tag. Cloud doesn't need to be virtual, either.
To me, I think of cloud as a business term that describes infrastructure that can be easily manipulated with software (or dashboards). That's what DO provides albeit with WAY less functionality than AWS (but at a much lower price point).
The usual cPanel PHP 5.4 shared hosting is consistently unreliable, insecure and a generally overall bad idea. Who would you actually even trust to run it?