I had a job interview with one of the founders. The whole process was, by far, the worst experience I ever had in my life, and a complete waste of my time. (I interviewed for maybe 25-30 jobs in my life overall).

Worst job interview or worst experience overall?

Both, easily.

same

The UI is simpler because the product is simpler. If all you want is 1-2 VMs in the cloud and to not think about the rest, its great. For any actual business that's moved from 'hobby'/'seed' phase, its not the right platform.

For great many businesses way past the "hobby" stage, a managed DB + managed queue + managed cache + a few VMs under managed k8s + serverless functions is plenty enough. Given a right architecture, this could serve a million paying customers. When you have more, you usually have the resources to consider a more elaborate setup.

I'd say that for most businesses 3-4 VMs, or a couple of bare metal boxes, is already enough, unless they grow explosively.

Recently I could not get a dedicated CPU "droplet" in any of the datacenters they have.

Their interview process sucks. They expect PhD-level experience for basic cloud operations. And since they started outsourcing to Hyderabad, they’ve gotten even worse.

'phd level experience' generally means 'very little real-world practical experience' lol