I've used DO's quite a bit. I'm a big fan... however I find the database latency pretty hard to deal with. In the past 6 months I've seen upwards of 30s for little side projects running tiny (100's of kb) databases. Sometimes it's lightning fast... sometimes it's a disaster.

As a consequence I've had to build quite defensively - adopting a PWA approach - heavy caching and background sync. My hope is that latency improves over time because the platform is nice to work with.

Yeah, but then I'm heavily coupled to their proprietary infrastructure. Maybe a good thing for them, but a nonstarter for thinking about building a real business on, for me and many others I'd presume.