Sorry if I'm reading between the lines too much, but 28 cores and 56GB RAM for a business that is not covering it's own cloud costs sounds like a lot of compute

Sorry if I'm reading between the lines too much, but 28 cores and 56GB RAM for a business that is not covering it's own cloud costs sounds like a lot of compute resources. Unless maybe you're doing something unusual and have a lot of data when you don't have a lot of users yet. I would try to aggressively cut those numbers, not the price per core, and stay with DigitalOcean if it was me. I've been forced to use cheap, less reliable VMs and it's a huge time waster unless you have a big team and big dev budget to code around it. You might need to slightly, "prematurely" optimize your computations to get by with less compute power, but if you're broke you're broke. Don't forget that the first few times you really need more compute resources, you can resize production to a bigger machine(s) in 10 minutes and that's not "wrong", even if it's not going to be the long term solution.