Why? Why is the $15 a recurring charge? I have a site on DigitalOcean with all the bells & whistles mentioned in the article. Granted it took me 2 aggravating days to get it setup via DO's tutorials. At the time I might have been happy to pay a one time fee. However, since you learn by doing, I am now a proficient enough webmaster to do what took me 2 days in 2 hours. That effort would be totally whack though, because once you have a site setup you can take a snapshot of it and use that image whenever you want to roll out a production ready site in mere minutes.

As far as digitalocean goes, unless Forge washes and waxes your car on a monthly basis I would think its usefulness is greatly diminished after one use. Or am I missing something?