I use DigitalOcean via Cloudways for Joomla and Wordpress sites.
My tests showed that it outperform any shared and managed hostings around, that is why I chose Cloudways.
Sure it probably depends on many things, such as what kind of cache, plugins u use, how many visitors you have and what they do on site …
I did many kind of testing and Cloudways always win.
I have no any problem to use 512 the starting droplet for 2 sites with 1000 unique visitors per day.
I tell you truth, all my website via Cloudways just fly without any problems.
I did same test on Digital Ocean ubuntu + wordpress droplet, which had really bad results during testing, bc. it is not optimized.
One thing is use great hardware and infrastructure, another also important to optimize software, update it and all managing around that.
Btw. shared hosting can sometimes show good results for test like this, but you are not able to do it long time, like is mentioned in that test, its up to 25 000 visits per month, so 500 current visitors are just teorethical, they will not allow you so high traffic on that plan.
Don’t care about any shared hosting, all are really far behind well optimized and managed cloud hostings …