Head-to-head
Hetzner Cloud vs DigitalOcean
Two hosts, side by side. Pricing, features, and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Hetzner Cloud from $4.5/mo
European VPS with the best price/performance ratio, period.
HQ DE · founded 1997
DigitalOcean from $6/mo
The original developer-friendly VPS — now with a full PaaS layer on top.
HQ US · founded 2011
Quick verdict
Cheapest: Hetzner Cloud wins on entry price ($4.5/mo vs $6/mo).
More features: DigitalOcean ships more first-party platform features out of the box.
Region: Hetzner Cloud is HQ'd in DE; DigitalOcean in US.
Cheapest plans, side by side
| Hetzner Cloud | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | CX22 | Basic 1 GB |
| Price | $4.5/mo | $6/mo |
| CPU | 2 vCPU (Intel) | 1 vCPU (shared) |
| RAM | 4 GB | 1 GB |
| Disk | 40 GB | 25 GB |
| Bandwidth | 20 TB | 1 TB |
Feature parity
| Hetzner Cloud | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Postgres | × | ✓ |
| Managed Redis | × | ✓ |
| Object storage | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-click apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private network | ✓ | ✓ |
| IPv6 | ✓ | ✓ |
| DDoS protection | ✓ | ✓ |
| Snapshots | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Terraform | ✓ | ✓ |
Hetzner Cloud pros
- +Cheapest credible VPS in the market — €4.51/mo for 2 vCPU + 4 GB RAM
- +AMD EPYC and Intel Sapphire Rapids in newer generations
- +20 TB of bandwidth included on entry-level plans
Hetzner Cloud cons
- −Account verification can take days for non-EU signups
- −No managed Postgres or Redis — you run them yourself
- −No US-east region (closest is Hillsboro, OR or Ashburn, VA)
DigitalOcean pros
- +Best documentation in the industry by a wide margin
- +Managed Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo, Kafka — all first-party
- +App Platform (Heroku-style git push) on the same dashboard as droplets
DigitalOcean cons
- −Roughly 2× the price of Hetzner for equivalent compute
- −Bandwidth overage charges hit hard once you exceed the bundled allotment
- −Some regions (Sydney, Bangalore) have noticeably slower disk than NYC/AMS