In short
Both rent virtual servers you run yourself. Hetzner's EU plans include 20 TB of traffic, but after its 2026 price rises, and with its cheapest lines currently unavailable, DigitalOcean's small Droplets start lower. Choose by location, the size you need and whether you want DigitalOcean's managed extras.
DigitalOcean Droplet
- Basic Droplets from $4 (1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 10 GiB, 500 GiB of transfer) to $24 (2 vCPU, 4 GiB).
- Transfer overage $0.01 per GiB; volumes $0.10 per GiB-month.
- Per-second billing since January 2026, capped at 672 hours a month; powered-off Droplets are still billed.
- You run the server yourself: OS, updates, backups and the database.
Hetzner Cloud
- EU CPX servers from $13.49 (1 vCPU, 2 GB) with 20 TB of traffic; overage $1.20 per TB.
- The cheaper CX and CAX lines are shown as unavailable at the moment.
- Primary IPv4 $0.60 a month; IPv6 is free.
- Prices rose on 1 April and 15 June 2026; US locations cost more and include 1–3 TB of traffic.
- You run the server yourself: OS, updates, backups and the database.
Sources
Prices were read from these pages on 29 September 2026.
- DigitalOcean Droplet: www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets, docs.digitalocean.com/products/volumes/details/pricing
- Hetzner Cloud: www.hetzner.com/cloud/regular-performance, www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized, docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/primary-ips/overview, docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment