Unsurpassed price/performance at Hetzner; polished service and global regions from DigitalOcean. An apples-to-apples comparison of options when you are shopping for your next VPS.
Price/performance straight up
The Cloud product from Hetzner defines the benchmark in terms of price/performance that all others are compared against. At about €4 a month, one can get the CX22 model with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB NVMe storage and 20 TB monthly bandwidth. The closest offer from DigitalOcean (2 vCPUs, 4 GB) costs $24 per month with 4 TB of included bandwidth. This is a difference in price of 4 to 6 times, which is true throughout the range.
The benchmarks confirm that there is no exaggeration here – the vCPUs provided by Hetzner deliver high performance under heavy load, and dedicated vCPUs from their CCX series compete with much more expensive solutions. In terms of computing performance per dollar, the clear winner is Hetzner.
Regions and latency
Geography is the biggest asset of DigitalOcean. Hetzner hosts its data centers in Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg), Finland (Helsinki), the US (Ashburn, Hillsboro) and Singapore. DigitalOcean offers 15+ regions, including Bangalore, Sydney, São Paulo, Toronto, London, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam.
With DigitalOcean you will have a region close to your users in India, Australia, South America or Canada. With Hetzner you won’t. If latency is critical for your application, this single factor may easily tip the scales despite all price considerations – no one enjoys an extra 200 ms of delay.
Managed services and ecosystem
Over the past decade, DigitalOcean has been working on the friendly-cloud ecosystem: managed Postgres/MySQL/Redis, Spaces (S3-compliant object storage with CDN), managed Kubernetes, App Platform, and superb documentation. Should you wish to delegate the databases to some service, DigitalOcean has one, while Hetzner has not.
The Hetzner ecosystem is intentionally more narrow: superb VMs, block volumes, load balancers, private networks, firewalls, and S3-compliant object storage. The company motto is: "We sell fast infrastructure at cheap prices; build your platform." Do not forget about the notorious sign-up verification process used by Hetzner: new signups may require ID verification, and account activation might take a day.
Support, billing and fine print
Billing: Hetzner is hourly rate with monthly caps in euros while DO has hourly caps in dollars; both clear cut
Backups: DO automated backups are 20% of the Droplet pricing, and similar to the pricing of Hetzner snapshots/backups per GB, both useful features
Overage bandwidth charges: While Hetzner charges around one euro for additional TB, DO charges ten dollars for each TB; tenfold difference, important for heavy-media applications
Support: DO has more elegant tiers of support while Hetzner is competent but brief in support, typical for Germans
Selection criteria
European/North American users for whom budget is an issue: Hetzner, without a doubt, where the saved money buys another server for deployment. Other regions where Hetzner is unavailable or need managed databases and more extensive ecosystem: DigitalOcean justifies its premium.
When there is deployment infrastructure like Peon sitting on top, the provider turns into a commodity, connecting to any Linux box via SSH so that one can host production on Hetzner, do a customer project on DigitalOcean, control both from one interface and walk away if needed.
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