Person whose job title has "senior network engineer" in it here. I work for a mid sized regional ASN doing middle-mile and last-mile transport and transit. Quite intentionally we offer no services to customers related to VM hosting or managed hosting. The closest we come is selling rack space/cooling/power to people who want to colocate their own equipment and be fully responsible for it themselves.
We are considerably smaller than DigitalOcean in staffing head count. But we have a network that is spread out geographically across five states and 30+ cities and towns, built a combination of third party lit L2 transport, dark fiber IRUs, and fiber we built ourselves. We're a facilities based WAN provider.
There are so many different possible types of ISPs. For a small organization it only makes sense to decide whether you want to go after a huge number of $5 a month customers, or if you want to focus your time and effort on customers that spend anywhere from $250/month upwards for last mile broadband services, colocation/hosting services, etc. As a generalization, the higher the dollar value of the customer, the less of a headache they are, and the higher the clue level of the customer is.
I concur with 100% of what the above poster says about the hosting business.
Bulk hosting/VPS/VM hosting is an incredibly brutal race to the bottom in pricing. Extensive well crafted automation tools and massive economies of scale are the only thing that will save you. I truly feel sorry for the people who are working (mostly entry-level) jobs doing first tier technical support/customer service for 5 dollar a month VPS customers.
If somebody wanted to hire me to work for a consumer-facing hosting company I would run away screaming. It's my idea of a personal hell in the ISP business. Those who have found a way to make it work, not go bankrupt and not have mental breakdowns are a rare breed.
