NewsBlur is mentioned in the article, but I cannot overstate how positive my experience with DigitalOcean has been. I'm stressing their biggest machines and spinning up dozens of differently configured boxes and they've handled it swimmingly well. Between the price and the performance differences, I'm glad I switched.
I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.
Network performance is fine, network reliability is the one you need to watch out for. I'm still working on getting some automated script to detect longer than expected timeouts through HAProxy and then issue a VM reboot through DO's API. It happens often enough that if I experience intermittent downtime, I turn to HAProxy's stats before looking at my munin graphs. But these things will resolve and ease in time. Bleeding edge is well named.
We are using a Cisco based network and working closely with them to build a resilient network architecture. We've already encountered a number of bugs within Cisco's platform that have surfaced and are working closely with their TAC to escalate and resolve them permanently not only for DigitalOcean but all providers world wide.
I also have a shadow site running in parallel on EC2, so I get to compare dollar for dollar. EC2 is strictly an apocalypse host at this point.