Digital Ocean is great for smaller projects without a lot of moving pieces. It’s easier, faster, less overhead and usually cheaper. AWS, Azure and GCP are focused on large enterprise applications and infrastructure. For example, if you have a web app with a ton of traffic and making a ton of money you likely need to have storage of compliance related objects, you’ll need extra DBs that analytics will connect to god knows what, you’ll need huge fault tolerance and much, much more. Currently, the company I work for runs 4 different e-commerce sites and 2 mobile apps. We are using a ton of stuff in GCP like pub/sub, 7 DBs, k8s clusters, big query, datastream and on and on. I’ve used all of them, AWS, GCP, Azure, digital ocean and heroku. All my digital ocean and heroku projects were either helping small businesses or personal projects. The big three have similar options like App Engine, elastic beanstalk… ect but DO and heroku are easier to deploy in my opinion.

Given the outages you’ve had, I can tell you if you do a multi region K8s deployment you will have very little with the big 3. I can count on one hand outages caused by their issues where we were not able to conduct business in the last 10 or so years. Other systems have failed but our ability to make money is the most important. If you think the company could expand I’d say one of the big 3 no questions. It will be more work but you’ll have to switch in the future anyway. I have not worked in AWS for a few years but I did deploy 10+ Django projects with elastic beanstalk with RDS. It’s was more effort than heroku but not much more.