In short
Hetzner's cheapest cloud plans cost a fraction of comparable DigitalOcean servers, but in November 2026 they cannot be ordered; the orderable Hetzner plans are in a similar price range to DigitalOcean at 4 GB of RAM. In return, DigitalOcean adds managed databases, App Platform and very extensive tutorials.
Side by side
| Hetzner Cloud | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM per month, net | CX23: €5.99 (not orderable); CPX22: €19.99 in Nuremberg, €16.99 in Helsinki | 24 US dollars (Basic Droplet) |
| VAT | Prices exclude VAT; 19% is added for customers in Germany | Prices exclude VAT; added for consumers, not with a VAT ID |
| New servers orderable | Restricted since June 2026 | Yes |
| Managed databases | No | Yes (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch) |
| Object storage (S3-compatible) | Yes | Yes (Spaces) |
| Managed Kubernetes | No | Yes |
| Git-push deploys | No (use Coolify) | Yes (App Platform) |
| Data centres in Europe | Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki | Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London |
| Sign-up | May ask for an ID or a credit card prepayment | Payment method required, 5 US dollar credit for 90 days |
| Billing | Hourly, with a monthly cap | Per second, with a monthly cap |
| Contracting party | Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany | DigitalOcean, LLC, USA |
As of November 2026. Sources: Hetzner Cost-Optimized, Hetzner Regular Performance, Hetzner status page, Hetzner locations, Hetzner, fraud prevention, DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, DigitalOcean, EU taxes, DigitalOcean regions and databases, DigitalOcean signup credit, DigitalOcean billing.
Data protection
At Hetzner, you conclude the data processing agreement (DPA) yourself in the customer account; it is not created automatically (Hetzner Docs). At DigitalOcean, the DPA is part of the terms of service. Because DigitalOcean is a US company, its DPA bases transfers to the US on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DigitalOcean DPA), even if your server is in Frankfurt. As of November 2026, not legal advice.
Choose Hetzner if
- price per resource matters most to you and you can order a plan,
- you run Postgres yourself (in Docker or via Coolify) and handle backups,
- your users are mostly in Europe.
Choose DigitalOcean if
- you want a managed database with automatic backups and optional standby nodes instead of running your own,
- you want App Platform or managed Kubernetes,
- servers are new to you and you want the tutorials right next to your dashboard.
Combining both
You can combine both: cheap Hetzner servers for apps and CI runners, and a managed DigitalOcean database only where losing data would really hurt. Check the latency between your Hetzner location and the DigitalOcean region first; for applications with many small database queries, every millisecond counts.
All five providers I looked at are in the VPS provider comparison.
[ Anolilab — Blog ]
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