Hetzner and DigitalOcean are the two names that come up most often when someone who ships software asks which VPS to deploy to. Both are developer-first, both have clean APIs and hourly billing, and both are a world away from a shared cPanel host. But in 2026 the honest comparison is no longer “two similar clouds, one is cheaper.” Pricing moved twice at Hetzner this year, ARM flipped from a bargain to a premium, and Hetzner’s cloud became, at the time of writing, partly unorderable. DigitalOcean went the other way: it cut its billing granularity to the second and kept adding managed services around the Droplet.
This page compares them on the tiers that matter for deployment: the entry 2 vCPU / 4 GB box and the mid-size 4 vCPU / 8 GB box, plus the egress, regions, and managed-ecosystem math that decides the real monthly bill. Every price was checked against the provider’s own pages on 2026-10-20 and is cited; figures we have not measured on our own paid accounts are not published.
We covered the two platforms more deeply elsewhere if you want the full picture: the Hetzner plan catalog and the CX23 vs CAX11 ARM math and the DigitalOcean vs Linode vs Vultr three-way at the entry tier. This page is the head-to-head.
The headline: what the same tier costs
Pricing is where the two diverge fastest, so start there. Hetzner prices are per network zone and exclude VAT and a primary IPv4 (more on that later); DigitalOcean prices are flat monthly caps with per-second billing underneath.
| Tier | Hetzner (EU monthly, excl. IPv4) | DigitalOcean Basic (monthly cap) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 1 GiB | CPX02: €5.99 | $6.00 |
| 1 vCPU / 2 GiB | CPX12: €11.49 | $12.00 |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | CX23: €5.49 | $24.00 |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | CX33: €8.49 | $48.00 |
DigitalOcean’s Basic 2 vCPU / 4 GiB Droplet is $24/mo with 80 GiB of SSD and 4,000 GiB of transfer.[1] Hetzner’s CX23, the same 2 vCPU / 4 GB on NVMe, is €5.49/mo.[2] On the mid tier, DO’s 4 vCPU / 8 GiB Droplet is $48/mo with 160 GiB and 5,000 GiB of transfer,[1] against Hetzner’s CX33 at €8.49/mo.[2]
That is a four-to-five-times gap on the sticker price, and it does not come from Hetzner being a bad deal - it comes from two different businesses. Hetzner runs a lean operation with its own data center parks in Germany and Finland and sells raw compute with shared vCPUs as cheaply as it can.[8][19] DigitalOcean prices its Droplets as the entry point to a platform you are expected to grow into: managed databases, object storage, load balancers, Kubernetes. You pay more per core and the money buys ecosystem and convenience.
Two caveats before you start comparing unit prices. First, Hetzner’s cheap line has no plan under 2 vCPU / 4 GB - Cost-Optimized starts at CX23 - but Regular Performance does now list two 1-vCPU plans, CPX02 (1 vCPU / 1 GB / 20 GB) at €5.99 and CPX12 (1 vCPU / 2 GB / 40 GB) at €11.49, so the $6 and $12 DigitalOcean entries do have a Hetzner counterpart, on slightly less disk.[1][3][4] Second, and more importantly, the €5.49 CX23 is not currently orderable. More on that in a moment.
The 2026 catch: can you actually order a Hetzner box?
Hetzner’s cloud is running with restricted provisioning. An ongoing status incident, open since June 26, 2026, states that due to high demand and limited hardware availability, “the creation of new cloud servers for both new customers and some of our existing customers” is restricted.[9]
In practice, on the day this was written, every plan on Hetzner’s cloud product pages - Cost-Optimized (CX, CAX), Regular Performance (CPX), and even the dedicated General Purpose (CCX) line - displayed “currently unavailable” for new orders.[3][4][5] This is a supply situation, not a product retirement: existing servers keep running and Hetzner says it is expanding capacity.[9] But if you are a new customer pricing a Hetzner server today, the honest answer is that you may not be able to create it, and this has been true for months.
This changes how you should read every Hetzner price below: €5.49 is the reference rate, and the reality for a new deployment is “order when capacity opens, or use DigitalOcean.”
Hetzner in detail
Prices and the June 15, 2026 adjustment
Hetzner raised cloud prices for new orders and rescales on June 15, 2026, and the shape of the increase matters: the shared CX/CAX tiers went up by roughly a third, while the CPX and CCX lines more than doubled:
| Plan | Specs | Monthly (EU, excl. IPv4) | Monthly (US) |
|---|---|---|---|
| CX23 | 2 shared vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe | €5.49 | $6.49 |
| CAX11 | 2 shared Ampere / 4 GB / 40 GB NVMe | €5.99 | $6.99 |
| CX33 | 4 shared vCPU / 8 GB / 80 GB NVMe | €8.49 | - |
| CPX22 | 2 shared AMD / 4 GB / 80 GB NVMe | €19.49 | $22.99 |
| CCX13 | 2 dedicated AMD / 8 GB / 80 GB NVMe | €42.99 | $50.99 |
All figures from Hetzner’s price adjustment documentation; the increase applied to new orders and rescales only.[2]
The ARM flip
The old advice “take the ARM box, it is cheaper” is dead on the current rate card. The Ampere-based CAX11 (2 vCPU / 4 GB) now costs €5.99/mo, fifty cents more than the x86 CX23 at €5.49 for identical memory and disk.[2] ARM started from a lower base and took a similar percentage increase, so it crossed above the x86 price instead of staying under it. At Hetzner, buying ARM is no longer a budget move. Meanwhile DigitalOcean has no ARM Droplets at all - there is an open feature request for ARM64 Droplets, and the Droplet pricing page offers Regular, Premium Intel, and Premium AMD CPU options only.[1][17] If you specifically need ARM, that is a Hetzner-only option in this pairing, and it is currently off sale and no longer cheaper.[3]
Egress: the included-traffic difference
Included egress is where Hetzner’s EU pricing looks almost absurd next to DigitalOcean. EU-located cloud servers include at least 20 TB of traffic per month, and additional traffic costs €1.00/TB ($1.20) in the EU and US.[7] DigitalOcean’s 2 vCPU / 4 GiB Droplet includes 4,000 GiB and charges $0.01 per GiB beyond that, which works out to roughly $10 per TB of overage.[1][11]
For a high-egress workload - a media server, an API serving large payloads, a download endpoint - Hetzner EU at 20 TB included and €1/TB overage is dramatically cheaper on the bill than DigitalOcean at 4,000 GiB included and ~$10/TB overage. But the caveat matters: that 20 TB is an EU-location number. Hetzner’s US locations include about 1 TB per month, and Singapore 0.5-5 TB depending on plan, with Singapore overage at €7.40/TB.[7] For US-facing high egress, Hetzner’s advantage shrinks to the overage rate only, and you still have the ordering problem.
IPv4 and other hidden costs
Hetzner bills a primary IPv4 separately at €0.50/mo ($0.60), while primary IPv6 is free.[6] So the realistic entry cost for a CX23 is €5.49 for the server plus €0.50 for the IPv4, and if you skip the IPv4 you are deploying IPv6-only, which will break clients on legacy networks. DigitalOcean includes a public IPv4 in the Droplet price and does not split it out for regular Droplets.[1] Hetzner also bills powered-off servers: as long as the instance exists, it is billed hourly up to the monthly cap, regardless of power state.[19] Snapshots and backups at Hetzner are paid add-ons, as are Volumes (block storage) and Load Balancers.[5]
DigitalOcean in detail
Droplet pricing and per-second billing
DigitalOcean’s Basic Droplet line is straightforward and flat. The plans that matter for deployment:[1]
| Plan | Specs | $/hr | $/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic s-1vcpu-1gb | 1 vCPU / 1 GiB / 25 GiB / 1,000 GiB | $0.00893 | $6.00 |
| Basic s-1vcpu-2gb | 1 vCPU / 2 GiB / 50 GiB / 2,000 GiB | $0.01786 | $12.00 |
| Basic s-2vcpu-4gb | 2 vCPU / 4 GiB / 80 GiB / 4,000 GiB | $0.03571 | $24.00 |
| Basic s-4vcpu-8gb | 4 vCPU / 8 GiB / 160 GiB / 5,000 GiB | $0.07143 | $48.00 |
Since January 1, 2026, Droplets are billed per second with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher.[18] The monthly figures are caps - a Droplet that runs all month never exceeds them, and short-lived instances cost only their actual seconds. That per-second granularity beats Hetzner’s hourly billing for bursty or test workloads: spin a build runner up for ten minutes and you pay for ten minutes, not an hour.
Transfer is pooled at the team level across all Droplets; overage is $0.01/GiB and inbound transfer is free.[11]
Regions: more US, no Latin America
DigitalOcean runs 16 datacenters across 13 regions for Droplets: New York (three), San Francisco (two), Atlanta, Richmond, Kansas City, and Memphis in the US; Toronto in Canada; Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt in Europe; plus Singapore, Bangalore, and Sydney.[10] Memphis (MEM1) is newer and currently hosts the v5 Droplet line (5th Gen AMD EPYC) along with Atlanta, Richmond, and Kansas City.[10] For a US audience, DigitalOcean gives you nine US datacenters to Hetzner’s two US colo locations (Ashburn and Hillsboro).[8][10] There is no Latin America Droplet region - a point that matters if your users are there, and one we covered in the three-way entry-tier comparison.
The managed ecosystem
This is the real reason to pay the DigitalOcean premium. Around the Droplet you get, as managed services with published prices:
- Managed databases - PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and a Redis-compatible cache; a single-node PostgreSQL starts at $15.15/mo for 1 GiB / 1 vCPU.[12]
- Spaces - S3-compatible object storage at $5/mo for 250 GiB, $0.02/GiB beyond that, with 1,024 GiB of outbound transfer included and $0.01/GiB overage.[13]
- Volumes - block storage at $0.10/GiB/mo ($10 per 100 GiB), attachable to any Droplet.[14]
- Load Balancers - regional load balancing from $12/mo.[15]
- Managed Kubernetes (DOKS) - control plane included at no cost; high availability for the control plane is $40/mo, and worker nodes are billed as Droplets.[16]
Hetzner, by contrast, has no managed databases, and its object storage is only available at EU locations (Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki) - no managed Postgres or Redis, and no S3-compatible store for a US deployment.[5][8] Hetzner does sell block storage, load balancers, snapshots, and backups, but each is a self-managed component.[5]
The managed-ecosystem math: what it costs to assemble it yourself
If you are tempted by Hetzner’s €5.49 and have no need for managed services, stop reading here - it is the better deal when you want to run everything yourself. But most deployments eventually need a database and some storage, and that is where the comparison stops being about the Droplet.
On DigitalOcean, a single-node managed PostgreSQL at $15.15/mo plus Spaces at $5/mo gives you a patched, backed-up database and S3-compatible storage without operating them.[12][13] On Hetzner you would run Postgres yourself on the VPS (free in license, but you own backups, patching, and failover) and, for US deployments, buy object storage from a third party because Hetzner’s is EU-only.[8] A rough honest math for a typical production setup:
- Hetzner path (self-managed): CX23 €5.49 + IPv4 €0.50, plus your time operating Postgres and backups - cheap cash cost, real operational cost (orderable equivalent: CPX22 at €19.49).[2][4]
- DigitalOcean path (managed): 2 vCPU / 4 GiB Droplet $24 + managed PostgreSQL $15.15 + Spaces $5 = ~$44/mo, with databases, object storage, and load balancing as managed services.[1][12][13]
Neither is “wrong.” The question is whether your bottleneck is cash or operating time. If you self-host everything on Docker already and know how to back up a Postgres, Hetzner is the better spend. If you would rather not run a database at 2 a.m., DigitalOcean’s $44/mo answer is defensible and predictable. Our Docker vs raw VPS guide covers the self-hosting side of this decision in depth.
Hidden costs, side by side
| Item | Hetzner | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| Public IPv4 | €0.50/mo extra[6] | included in Droplet price[1] |
| Billing granularity | hourly, capped at monthly[19] | per-second since Jan 1, 2026[18] |
| Powered-off instance | still billed[19] | still billed (per-second, but billable) |
| Egress overage | €1.00/TB EU & US, €7.40/TB SIN[7] | $0.01/GiB (~$10/TB), pooled[11] |
| Snapshots | paid add-on[5] | $0.06/GiB per month[1] |
| Managed database | none | from $15.15/mo[12] |
| Object storage | EU locations only[8] | Spaces from $5/mo[13] |
Verdict by workload
| Workload | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Side project, self-hosted on Docker | Hetzner (when orderable) | CX23 at €5.49, 20 TB egress, raw compute is hard to beat. Availability is the caveat. |
| Side project, need it running today | DigitalOcean | 2 vCPU / 4 GiB at $24 is orderable, per-second billing, 4,000 GiB included. |
| Production with a database | DigitalOcean | Managed PostgreSQL from $15.15/mo removes the DB-ops burden; same ecosystem. |
| High egress, EU users | Hetzner | 20 TB included, €1.00/TB overage - no contest at scale. |
| High egress, US users | DigitalOcean | Hetzner US includes only ~1 TB; DO’s US transfer pools and $0.01/GiB are the better fit despite the overage math. |
| Latency-sensitive EU audience | Hetzner | Three EU data centers, GDPR-compliant, cheapest EU egress.[7][8][19] |
| Latency-sensitive US audience | DigitalOcean | Nine US datacenters vs Hetzner’s two US colo locations.[8][10] |
| ARM workloads | Hetzner (EU only, currently off sale) | DO has no ARM Droplets; Hetzner’s CAX is the only option here, and it is no longer cheaper than x86.[2][3][17] |
Bottom line
Hetzner is the better raw-VPS deal and the better EU-everything deal, by a wide margin on paper. DigitalOcean is the better platform deal: it is orderable right now, it has US regions, and its managed ecosystem turns a VPS into something a small team can run without a dedicated ops person. The decision is less “which is cheaper” and more “what are you willing to operate yourself, and where are your users.”
If Hetzner’s availability opens up and you are comfortable running your own database, a CX23 at €5.49 plus your own Docker stack is the cheapest serious deployment in Europe. If you need to deploy today, want managed Postgres and S3-compatible storage, or are serving a US audience, DigitalOcean earns its premium.
Sources
- DigitalOcean - Droplet pricing (Basic plans: 1 vCPU/1 GiB $6, 1 vCPU/2 GiB $12, 2 vCPU/4 GiB $24, 4 vCPU/8 GiB $48; per-second billing note). https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets ; snapshot price $0.06/GiB per month: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/snapshots/details/pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner Docs - Price Adjustment 15 June 2026 (old/new hourly and monthly prices excl. IPv4 for CX, CAX, CPX, CCX in DE/FI, US and SIN; applies to new orders and rescales). https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/standardization-and-price-adjustment-of-our-server-products/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner - Cost-Optimized Cloud Servers (CX23, CAX11, CX33 specs; “not available” status on the product line). https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner - Regular Performance Cloud Servers (CPX02 1 vCPU/1 GB and CPX12 1 vCPU/2 GB 1-vCPU plans, CPX22/CPX32 specs; “currently unavailable” status). https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner - General Purpose Cloud Servers (CCX13 specs and price; add-ons: snapshots, backups, Volumes, Load Balancer). https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/general-purpose/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner Docs - IP pricing (Cloud Primary IPv4 €0.50/$0.60 monthly, Primary IPv6 free). https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/ipv4-pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner - Cloud overview (at least 20 TB inclusive traffic at EU locations, ~1 TB US, 0.5-5 TB SIN; additional traffic €1.00/$1.20 per TB EU and US, €7.40/$8.49 SIN). https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner Docs - Locations (four network zones, six locations: FSN1, NBG1, HEL1, ASH, HIL, SIN; Object Storage availability by location). https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations/ - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner Status - Incident “Limited availability of cloud instances” (ongoing since 2026-06-26; creation of new cloud servers restricted for new and some existing customers). https://status.hetzner.com/incident/0a75c7ae-3377-41dc-aabe-601063724d24 - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Droplet Availability (16 datacenters across 13 regions; MEM1 and v5 Droplets in ATL1/RIC1/MKC1/MEM1). https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/details/availability/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Bandwidth Billing (Droplet overage $0.01/GiB; transfer pooled at team level; inbound free). https://docs.digitalocean.com/platform/billing/bandwidth/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean - Managed Databases pricing (PostgreSQL/MySQL Standard single node from $15.15/mo). https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/managed-databases - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Spaces Pricing (subscription $5/mo, 250 GiB included, $0.02/GiB/mo additional; 1,024 GiB outbound included, $0.01/GiB overage). https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/details/pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Volume pricing (block storage $0.10/GiB/mo). https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/volumes/details/pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Load Balancers pricing (regional HTTP $12/mo per node, network $15/mo, up to 200 nodes). https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/networking/load-balancers/details/pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Docs - Kubernetes pricing (control plane included at no cost; HA $40/mo; nodes billed as Droplets). https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/details/pricing/ - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean Ideas - “Support for ARM64 Droplets” feature request (no ARM Droplets currently offered). https://ideas.digitalocean.com/core-compute-platform/p/support-for-arm64-droplets - checked 2026-10-20
- DigitalOcean - Pricing overview (per-second billing effective January 1, 2026; minimum 60 seconds or $0.01). https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets - checked 2026-10-20
- Hetzner - Cloud overview (hourly postpaid billing capped at monthly price; powered-off servers still billed; 99.9% SLA). https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ - checked 2026-10-20