This is very true. It is the nature of cheap unmanaged services that the user bears the bulk of the burden of maintaining their server instance. But this makes it even more important that providers fess up when they have issues.

I have only been with DO for a short time but I have already encountered several of these silent outages where I can't query the status of my server through their tools and there is no status update. It is very different to Linode. They are a fantastic service for personal sites but I wouldn't host anything professional with them until they do more to gain my confidence.