Could someone more knowledgeable please provide some insight into why using their load balancers would be preferred over, say having regular Droplet instances act as load balancers, by leveraging nginx for instance?
Single droplets are a single point of failure and have a limited availability. You can take actions to mitigate this SPOF like running multiple droplets and distributing requests by adding all of these droplets to your DNS configuration also known as DNS round robin.
Another solution is too pay Digital Ocean to provide network endpoints that are more available and allow you to provide a higher availability for your application. Because DO works on different level of abstraction they have more possibilities to provide this availability.
eicnix says here "Droplets are a single-point-of-failure".
I don't see any direct explanation as to how these LBs aren't. It's limited to a single region for backend droplets, and who knows how fragile they are.
Putting up a droplet with caddy/nginx/apache and acting like a reverse proxy, depending on your usecase, could be 75% cheaper than this solution offered.
