MySQL Performance - Digital Ocean vs Vagrant Dev

I have a Laravel application being developed locally in the homestead environment (Vagrant / VirtualBox with Ubuntu & MySQL). It's my understanding that this environment isn't terribly performant, but serves well for dev.

I pushed up my code to a Digital Ocean droplet recently (managed by Laravel Forge) expecting to see a nice performance boost and to my surprise, the tests (and requests in general) were nearly twice as slow.

I'm wondering if there's anything I should be looking for? I would think DigitalOcean should run much faster than the local VM on my iMac.

Both VirtualBox and Digital Ocean are running similar specs: 2 processors, 2 gigs RAM