In reply to Jason.

You can not compare Digital Ocean harware with normal shared hosting.
Your experience its bc. there was not optimized software - ngix, cache, varnish, memcache ...
You can have the best hardware in the World but reading from SSD can not be faster than from RAM - cache on worse hardware.
So use Digital Ocean is great, but you have to use some managed service or yourself or hire someone who can configure good server.