Hetzner vs DigitalOcean 2026 — Bare-Metal vs Managed UX

Hetzner raised prices 30–37% in April 2026 and is still roughly 60–70% cheaper than DigitalOcean for equivalent compute. If your users are EU-based and you’re comfortable managing your own database, Hetzner wins on cost by a margin that’s hard to talk yourself out of. If you need managed Postgres, team RBAC, or users in North America and Asia-Pacific, DigitalOcean earns its premium.

Who this is for

Solo devs and early-stage startups deciding where to host their next project. If you’re already deep in AWS or GCP infrastructure, neither of these will justify a migration without a very specific reason.

The verdict at a glance

	Hetzner	DigitalOcean
2 vCPU / 4 GB (EU)	€7.99/mo (~$8.63)	$24/mo
4 vCPU / 8 GB	€13.99/mo (~$15.11)	$48/mo
Bandwidth included	20 TB (EU) / 1 TB (US)	3–6 TB
Bandwidth overage	€1.00/TB	~$10.24/TB
Managed PostgreSQL	✗	✓ from $15/mo
Managed Kubernetes	Free control plane	Free control plane
Object storage	€6.49/mo, no CDN	$5/mo, CDN included
Load balancer	from €7.49/mo	from $12/mo
Regions	5 (EU-heavy)	14+ (global)
Team RBAC	✗	✓
Published SLA	None	99.99%
Single-core Geekbench 6	~939 (AMD EPYC-Rome)	~772 (Intel Xeon)
Referral program	✗	✓ ($25/referral)

Pricing breakdown

The April 2026 increase — and why it doesn’t change the conclusion

On April 1, 2026, Hetzner raised cloud prices 30–37%, citing drastic price increases in various areas in the IT sector. The entry CX22 at €2.99/mo became the CX23 at €3.99/mo. The CPX22 — the most popular tier among developers — rose to €7.99/mo.

That is a real increase. But context: at €7.99/mo, the CPX22 (2 vCPU AMD EPYC, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB NVMe, 20 TB bandwidth) is still less than a third of DigitalOcean’s equivalent $24/mo Basic Droplet.

Hetzner Cloud — current tiers (June 2026, EU, excl. VAT)

All EU plans include 20 TB/month outbound bandwidth. Overage: €1.00/TB.

Instance	CPU	RAM	Storage	EUR/mo
CX23	2 vCPU Intel	4 GB	40 GB SSD	€3.99
CAX11	2 vCPU ARM	4 GB	40 GB SSD	€4.49
CPX22	2 vCPU AMD EPYC	4 GB	80 GB NVMe	€7.99
CAX21	4 vCPU ARM	8 GB	80 GB SSD	€7.99
CPX32	4 vCPU AMD EPYC	8 GB	160 GB NVMe	€13.99
CCX13	2 vCPU Dedicated	8 GB	80 GB NVMe	€15.99
CCX23	4 vCPU Dedicated	16 GB	160 GB NVMe	€31.49

US region caveat: Hetzner Ashburn (US) includes 1 TB/month — not 20 TB. The bandwidth advantage largely disappears for US-primary workloads.

Hetzner also offers bare-metal dedicated servers via Hetzner Robot. The AX42-U (AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8700GE, 64 GB DDR5, NVMe SSD) runs around €39/mo. That is physical server performance at a fraction of what comparable bare metal costs elsewhere.

DigitalOcean — current tiers (June 2026)

Bandwidth overage: $0.01/GiB (~$10.24/TB).

Plan	vCPU	RAM	Storage	Transfer	USD/mo
Basic	1	512 MB	10 GB SSD	500 GB	$4
Basic	2	4 GB	80 GB SSD	3 TB	$24
Basic	4	8 GB	160 GB SSD	5 TB	$48
Basic	8	16 GB	320 GB SSD	6 TB	$96

DigitalOcean added per-second billing (60-second floor, $0.01 minimum). Useful for CI/CD runners and burst workloads you tear down quickly.

The bandwidth trap

A site transferring 20 TB/month pays:

Hetzner EU: €0 extra — included
DigitalOcean $24 plan: ~$198/mo total — $24 base + $10.24/TB × ~17 TB overage

At moderate traffic, the bandwidth math dwarfs the server cost. A $24 DO Droplet with a busy site can run $80–$130/mo in practice. Factor this in before assuming the listed price is your actual cost.

Managed services

This is where the comparison flips.

Hetzner has no managed database product. No managed Postgres, no managed Redis, no managed anything beyond the cloud server itself. Teams that need a managed database on Hetzner must self-host on a VPS or route database traffic to a third-party managed Postgres service (Neon, Supabase, Railway, etc.).

DigitalOcean has a full managed services stack:

Service	DigitalOcean	Hetzner
Managed PostgreSQL	✓ from $15/mo	✗
Managed MySQL	✓ from $15/mo	✗
Managed Redis / Valkey	✓ from $15/mo	✗
Managed MongoDB	✓	✗
Managed Kafka	✓	✗
App Platform (PaaS)	✓ from $5/mo	✗
Container Registry	✓	✗
Object Storage w/ CDN	✓ $5/mo	€6.49/mo, no CDN

DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL entry ($15/mo) handles patching, point-in-time backups, and failover. High-availability standby roughly doubles the cost. It supports pg_vector, PostGIS, and logical replication — covers most production SaaS needs.

The practical question: do you want to operate Postgres yourself? On Hetzner, that means configuring WAL archiving, handling major-version upgrades, managing replication, and testing failover. For a solo dev, that’s several hours of setup and ongoing ops vigilance. For a team with no dedicated infrastructure engineer, it’s a distraction from the product. Decide which category you’re in before comparing prices.

Network footprint and latency

Regions

Hetzner: Nuremberg, Falkenstein, Helsinki, Ashburn (US), Singapore — 5 locations, heavily EU-weighted.

DigitalOcean: NYC (3), SFO (2), Atlanta, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Singapore, Sydney — 14+ locations.

Benchmark results (YABS v2025-04-20, Ubuntu 24.04)

Hetzner CPX22, Helsinki:

Destination	Throughput (send)	Latency
Amsterdam (AMS-IX)	8.08 Gbps	28.8 ms
London	5.02 Gbps	38.0 ms
New York	1.73 Gbps	131 ms
Singapore	973 Mbps	184 ms

DigitalOcean Basic 4 GB, NYC3:

Destination	Throughput (send)	Latency
NYC (local)	3.5 Gbps	0.4 ms
Los Angeles	2.2 Gbps	68 ms
London	2.3 Gbps	73 ms
Amsterdam	2.0 Gbps	84 ms
Singapore	800 Mbps	231 ms

CPU benchmark (Geekbench 6)

Geekbench 6.3, Ubuntu 24.04, single-run; CPX22 Helsinki (Hetzner) / Basic 4 GB NYC3 (DigitalOcean), tested 2026-06-01.

Instance	Single-core score	Notes
CPX22 (AMD EPYC-Rome)	~939	Hetzner Helsinki
Basic 4 GB (Intel Xeon)	~772	DigitalOcean NYC3

The 8.08 Gbps EU-to-EU figure from Hetzner Helsinki is genuine — Hetzner peers directly at AMS-IX and DE-CIX. For a static site or API serving European users, you will not exhaust that capacity on a CPX22.

For US and Asia-Pacific traffic, DigitalOcean’s regional footprint wins. Singapore users served from Hetzner Helsinki see ~184ms. Served from DigitalOcean’s Singapore datacenter, that drops to single-digit milliseconds.

Developer experience and tooling

Dashboard

DigitalOcean: resource tagging, project-based organization, team RBAC, per-resource billing breakdown. Hetzner’s Cloud Console is cleaner but minimal — no project separation, no RBAC, no billing drill-down per resource.

Both provision servers in under 60 seconds. Hetzner offers Placement Groups (control physical server placement to avoid co-location) — DigitalOcean has no equivalent.

API and Terraform

Both offer first-class REST APIs and maintained Terraform providers. DigitalOcean’s provider covers the full product suite including managed databases, Kubernetes, and App Platform. Hetzner’s covers cloud servers, volumes, networks, firewalls, and load balancers — solid, but without a managed service layer to configure.

One-click apps

DigitalOcean Marketplace: 100+ apps, community-contributed, including Discourse, Ghost, ML images, and ISV-managed stacks.
Hetzner: ~20 — Docker, WordPress, GitLab, Nextcloud, LAMP, LEMP. Functional, not expansive.

Documentation

DigitalOcean’s community tutorials are a category-leading resource. Search “how to set up Nginx on Ubuntu” and the top result is almost always a DigitalOcean tutorial. For developers still building Linux intuition, that content ecosystem has real value.

Hetzner’s documentation is functional and API-accurate, but sparse on infrastructure guides. The community lives on Reddit (r/hetzner, r/homelab, r/webhosting) and Hetzner’s own forum.

Onboarding friction

New Hetzner accounts sometimes require photo ID verification before the first server is accessible. The delay can be hours, occasionally longer. Developers who need to spin up infrastructure immediately should factor this in.

Gotchas

Hetzner AUP enforcement is strict. Hetzner has terminated contracts with limited warning for AUP violations — spam, mass scanning, exit nodes. Legitimate business workloads are fine. Grey-area use cases carry real account termination risk.

Hetzner US bandwidth is 1 TB, not 20 TB. Every headline about “20 TB included” refers to EU plans only. Ashburn matches most competitors at 1 TB. If you’re building a US-primary product, the bandwidth advantage largely disappears.

DigitalOcean overage compounds fast. The $0.01/GiB overage rate reads as negligible. At 10 TB overage, that’s $102.40. A site with moderate traffic can easily add $50–$150/mo in transfer fees on top of the Droplet price.

Hetzner has no published SLA. For production in regulated environments — healthcare, finance, contracts with SLA commitments — the absence of a formal guarantee may be a blocker regardless of actual uptime history.

Currency risk on Hetzner. Hetzner bills in EUR. At EUR/USD 1.08, CPX22 is ~$8.63/mo; at EUR/USD 1.15, it’s ~$9.19/mo. Small spread, but worth including in USD budget forecasts.

When to choose Hetzner

Cost is the primary constraint. The 60–70% savings are real, even post-April 2026.
Your users are EU-based. 20 TB included bandwidth + 8 Gbps AMS-IX throughput for <$9/mo is unmatched at this price tier.
You’re bandwidth-heavy. 10 TB extra costs €10 on Hetzner EU vs ~$103 on DigitalOcean.
You’re comfortable managing your own Postgres, backups, and failover.
EU data residency is a requirement. Germany and Finland are strong GDPR jurisdictions (ISO 27001 certified).
You want bare-metal performance. Hetzner Robot’s AX-series dedicated servers deliver physical server specs at cloud-competitive prices.
Hobby hosting, homelab, or side projects where ops cost is your own time.

When to choose DigitalOcean

You need managed databases. Postgres, Redis, Kafka, MongoDB — none of this exists on Hetzner.
Your team has more than two engineers who need billing visibility and resource separation.
You’re building a global product with users in North America, South Asia, or Australia.
You want App Platform for PaaS-style deploys without managing container infrastructure.
A documented 99.99% uptime SLA is required for compliance or customer contracts.
Your primary workload is US-based — Hetzner US loses the bandwidth advantage entirely.
Per-second billing for bursty CI/CD workloads matters to you.

Conclusion

The comparison looks like cost-vs-convenience, but the actual dividing line is managed databases.

If you need managed Postgres: DigitalOcean is the right call. Running your own Postgres cluster with HA and backups adds engineering overhead that costs more than the monthly price difference at any reasonable developer hourly rate.

If you don’t need managed databases and your users are in Europe: Hetzner is hard to argue against. The April 2026 increase made headlines, but a CPX22 at €7.99/mo gives you faster CPU (AMD EPYC, ~939 Geekbench 6 single-core vs ~772 on DO’s Intel Xeon), more NVMe storage, and 20 TB of bandwidth — all for less than a third of what DigitalOcean charges for an equivalent-spec Droplet.

DigitalOcean’s referral program gives new accounts $25 in credit — enough for roughly a month on their $24 Basic Droplet. Worth using to evaluate whether their managed services fit your workflow before committing to either provider.

If neither is the right fit — you want PaaS-style deploys without managing VMs at all — the best full-stack deploy platforms for 2026 covers Render, Fly.io, and Railway side-by-side.