"You can't take an AWS VM and fire it up on DigitalOcean without trial by fire. VM's should be portable but they're not because cloud providers don't want them to be."

You can't ?

I have never used DO, but I have deployed linux and FreeBSD systems on EC2 and moving them to bare metal was just a tar command away ... you can even pipeline 'dd' over ssh if you want to be fancy ...