Hetzner vs DigitalOcean
Both appear in 4 sections: compute, object storage, egress, footprint. Hetzner is cheaper on 6 of 7 comparable measures.
Hetzner and DigitalOcean are the two obvious answers to "I need a Linux box", and they are priced on opposite philosophies. Hetzner sells German and Finnish capacity at close to cost: a 2 vCPU, 4 GB machine runs a few euros a month, and every server ships with 20 TB of traffic, which in practice means egress is free. DigitalOcean charges roughly twice as much for the same specification and bundles 1 TB, but sells a platform around it: managed databases, app hosting, Spaces, a mature API and documentation that has taught a generation of developers to deploy. The right choice follows from what you are optimising. If the workload is a known quantity you will run for years, Hetzner's arithmetic is very hard to argue with, and the 20 TB allowance alone can be worth more than the server. If you are shipping something whose shape is still changing, DigitalOcean's managed services save engineering time that costs more than the price difference. Geography decides many cases on its own: Hetzner concentrates on Europe with two US sites and Singapore, while DigitalOcean spans nine regions across four continents, so latency to your users may settle it before price does. Neither pays Pikkly anything on a Hetzner click, and the tables below rank purely on the published numbers.
Compute
All compute →Object storage
All object storage →Egress
All egress →Footprint
All footprint →| Metric | Hetzner | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| Regionshigher is better | 64 countries | 9Cheaper8 countries |
Pikkly earns nothing from Hetzner, and the ranking above is by price regardless.