With the introduction of the t2.nano, not really. Even if you don't want to go Amazon, GCE is super useful for personal stuff too.
Old school VPS providers can't compete due to resources. Amazon and Google have far more people working on perf, security, and so on. Sadly, VPS providers are going the way of shared hosting.
You seem to be brushing off the fact that the vast majority of even the tech-savvy market simply doesn't require the flexibility of AWS and will happily go get better perf (CPU, disk), and more memory and transfer, at a fraction of the cost elsewhere.
The nano doesn't tempt me to move any of the half dozen or so VPS's I have running to AWS in the slightest. I'll stick to vendors who answer support tickets from the little guys, oversell fairly, and don't have a ridiculously complex pricing structure.
And shared hosting isn't dead. Plenty of small businesses still pay good money for managed shared hosting to run their webpages etc, instead of paying a wannabe-sysadmin who probably doesn't even shell-in to the VPS once a month. My uncle runs a small business and pays his webmaster around $30/month for a website running off an IP that hosts at least 3,300 other domains...most of them small businesses just like his. Someone is making a mint on that box.
Your comment has really tempted me to switch to AWS from DO just to try the waters of the cloud. However, the terminology and all the different services offered by AWS are mind-boggling.
Are there any good introductions to cloud computing you could recommend?
If you're coming from running standalone servers on DO you don't need to worry about most of AWS' services.
To get the equivalent you'll need to read up on the basics of:
EC2, which provides you with the actual server.
EBS, their network attached storage which your server will boot from.
Elastic IPs, to give the server a stable public IP address you can point DNS at.
And Security Groups, which don't have a DO equivalent, but control network access to your server. They're arguably worth moving from DO for alone.
If you just want to test the waters then EC2's startup wizard will handle all this for you, and you don't really have to think much more about it than you would on DO. However, you've then got the ability to grow into the rest of AWS as you need it.
I'm not in the industry (I'm in higher education), but this is news to me.
Are there any use cases where Digital Ocean/Linode would be better than AWS? A small blog, website, perhaps?