I'm confused. £4 ($6.83) for a 64mb RAM, 3GB VM vs. $5 (£2.93) 512mb RAM, 20GB SSD from DigitalOcean I'm seeing zero advantage and a whole lot of disadvatage for my extra $1.83. Honestly, you can colo a Raspberry Pi and have a better machine for cheaper.
We offer it for £4/year not month. SO significantly cheaper.
A Raspberry Pi would not provide better performance than the E3 we have.
Anyway an idea: it's fun. Trying to run a whole LAMP stack or a RoR stack on 64MB RAM is more fun than not using all your resources. Also we're cheap and people like that. We might not always beat them in performance but we don't break the bank either.
DigitalOcean even has ipv6 now. What's the point?