All the debate about using VPS services vs. self-hosted would be settled by consulting the terms of service or contacting DigitalOcean directly. I'm pretty sure Amazon would have no problem with pegging CPU usage at 100% because that's what EC2 instances are often used for. They are on-demand processing power, designed for instant scalability. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, offers a significantly cheaper VPS plan. My instinct tells me they are like the majority of web hosts that oversell hardware with the realization that most users never approach 100% utilization. I'm not saying DigitalOcean cheats, in fact, I've been a very happy customer for over two months now. Just that they may be optimistic in their pricing and will need to adjust prices if a majority of users peg their VPS CPUs.