ah yes minio! the one issue i have with using VPS for production is, are they hardened? or is it enough just with proper unix user management and UFW? I have this fear that the VPS box has attack surfaces or zero day vulnerabilities but when I am on the cloud I do not have this worry.

Perhaps irrational but can't argue with the peace of mind that expensive clouds offer. Although we've seen misconfigured S3 buckets leaking data so.

What makes you believe the threat model for AWS is different than DO? They are just VMs at the end of the day.