I've seen entire businesses supporting double digit employees run off single $20/mo DO droplets, with just the builtin backup/snapshot capability used for redundancy. One of these had 50,000 concurrent realtime API users on such a droplet.
Ultimately what is most important is knowing your needs and how quickly you can recover from disaster, not how much you spend on infrastructure.
Simulating the "Ok we came in to the office this morning and Digital Ocean no longer existed" scenario is more valuable to most small businesses than just throwing money at over-engineered AWS solutions.
I've seen entire businesses supporting double digit employees run off single $20/mo DO droplets, with just the builtin backup/snapshot capability used for redundancy. One of these had 50,000 concurrent realtime API users on such a droplet.
Ultimately what is most important is knowing your needs and how quickly you can recover from disaster, not how much you spend on infrastructure.
Simulating the "Ok we came in to the office this morning and Digital Ocean no longer existed" scenario is more valuable to most small businesses than just throwing money at over-engineered AWS solutions.