I don't really care. My $6/month deal beats any $5/month deal from the major players, and by a huge margin. I recently tested the internet speed on it, and I got 850 real Mbps out of the promised 1Gbps channel, which is good enough for me. I can give Memcached 1GB of RAM and not worry about killing everything else.
I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.
All the critical things should sit in RAM anyway. The SSD will beat the HDD if you read/write to disk heavily. But not if you need space.
If I need an SSD, there are options too, though DigitalOcean is indeed one of the best if you need a cheap US-based server. If the location doesn't matter, EU, Russia, Ukraine have some great deals.
He is free to use his server how he sees fit. And are you really sure that Amazon is going after a very different market with their 5$/mo. offer than a low-cost VPS provider?
I think comparing a (NVMe?) SSD solution to a HDD one shows the OPs ignorance of the differing market segments each is going after. They aren't comparable solutions.
I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.