Hetzner vs DigitalOcean Pricing in US and EU Regions After the 2026 Price Change

Most Hetzner vs DigitalOcean comparisons still say the same thing: Hetzner is far cheaper. For a server in Germany or Finland that is still true. For a server in the United States it stopped being true on 15 June 2026, when Hetzner's price adjustment pushed its US cloud plans up by nearly three times. A 2 GB shared server in Hetzner's Ashburn or Hillsboro location now lists at $20.49 a month, while a 2 GB DigitalOcean Droplet in New York is $12.

Every price below was read from Hetzner's price adjustment page in its docs and from DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing page in October 2026. All figures are USD per month, excluding VAT, and Hetzner's figures exclude the public IPv4 address, which Hetzner bills as a separate line.

Is Hetzner cheaper than DigitalOcean?

In Europe, yes: Hetzner's shared plans cost about a quarter of a comparable DigitalOcean Droplet. In the US, no: Hetzner's shared CPX plans now cost roughly 50 to 70 percent more than DigitalOcean Basic Droplets with the same memory. The exception in the US is dedicated vCPU, where Hetzner's CCX line still undercuts DigitalOcean's General Purpose Droplets.

The reason the answer flips is that DigitalOcean charges the same Droplet price in every region, while Hetzner prices each location separately. Its cheapest shared line, the CX plans, is listed only for Germany and Finland. The US locations get the CPX and CCX lines, and those were the plans that rose the most in June.

Hetzner vs DigitalOcean pricing for US servers

This is the table that matters for a US business serving US customers from a US data center.

Hetzner still gives more vCPU at the 2 GB and 4 GB sizes, so a CPU bound PHP app may close part of the gap. For a typical Laravel, WordPress or Node app that runs out of memory long before it runs out of CPU, the Droplet is the better buy in the US.

Dedicated vCPU tells a different story. Hetzner's CCX13 (2 dedicated vCPU, 8 GB) is $50.99 in the US against $63 for DigitalOcean's General Purpose Droplet with 2 vCPU and 8 GB. CCX23 (4 vCPU, 16 GB) is $102.99 against $126, and CCX33 (8 vCPU, 32 GB) is $165.99 against $252. If your workload needs guaranteed CPU, such as a busy database or a queue that crunches images, Hetzner remains the cheaper US option.

Hetzner vs DigitalOcean pricing for EU servers

These EU numbers are why Hetzner earned its reputation, and they still hold after June. Hetzner's EU plans also include 20 TB of outbound traffic, against 4,000 to 6,000 GiB on the Droplets above. For an app whose customers are in Europe, or for background work where latency does not matter (CI runners, batch jobs, staging servers), Hetzner in Germany is the cheapest serious option on this page.

For US customers it is a trade. A request from the East Coast to Nuremberg crosses the Atlantic and back, which adds a noticeable delay to every page view and every API call, and US contracts sometimes require data to stay in the US. Saving $38 a month on an 8 GB server is not worth slower checkouts for your customers.

Bandwidth, IPv4 and the lines that are not on the price tag

DigitalOcean includes transfer with every Droplet and charges $0.01 per GiB past the pooled allowance; Hetzner includes 20 TB on EU plans and 1 TB on the US CPX11, and bills overage in 100 MB blocks. Hetzner also lists the public IPv4 address as its own invoice line, so every Hetzner figure above gets a small IPv4 charge added. DigitalOcean's Droplet price includes the IPv4 address.

Managed services are the bigger hidden difference. DigitalOcean sells managed MySQL and PostgreSQL from $15.15 a month for a single node, Spaces object storage, load balancers and App Platform. Hetzner Cloud offers load balancers, volumes and object storage, but its object storage endpoints are in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki only, and there is no managed database service, so the database runs on a server you manage. For a team without a dedicated ops person, that one difference often decides the choice.

What a small US fleet costs on each provider

Four setups a US agency or SaaS team actually runs, with the server management panel included so the totals are what you would pay. The rows with a panel use DeployManage Growth at $129 a month, which covers up to 10 servers with zero downtime releases; Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month is the cheaper panel if seats and an activity log do not matter to you.

The last row is where the gap narrows in the US: two shared Droplets plus a dedicated General Purpose Droplet for the database come to $96 + $63 + $129 = $288, against $73.49 times two plus $50.99 plus $129 = $326.97 on Hetzner US. DigitalOcean stays cheaper, but by less, because the dedicated database box is cheaper at Hetzner. If you would rather not run the database yourself, a $15.15 DigitalOcean managed database replaces that server and drops the DigitalOcean total further.

Which should a US business choose?

Pick DigitalOcean for US hosted apps on shared plans, Hetzner US for dedicated CPU, and Hetzner EU for European customers and for anything where latency does not matter. Many teams end up with both: production Droplets in New York or San Francisco, and cheap Hetzner boxes in Germany for staging, CI and backups. The catch with two providers is two consoles, two firewalls, two sets of SSH keys and two invoices a month, one of them possibly in euros. If finance books those by hand, it helps to pull the line items out of each provider's PDF invoice automatically rather than retyping them.

The console problem is the one a panel solves. DeployManage provisions servers on DigitalOcean and Hetzner from the same dashboard, installs the same Nginx, PHP, database, Redis and Supervisor stack on both, and deploys every site as an atomic release, so moving an app from a Hetzner box to a Droplet is a matter of pointing the site at a new server. The Hetzner control panel page covers the Hetzner side in detail, including API tokens per project, and Laravel DigitalOcean hosting covers Droplets. If you run Laravel on Hetzner today and are weighing Forge, see Laravel Forge Hetzner alternative.

How to move servers between Hetzner and DigitalOcean

A move between the two is a server migration, not a platform migration, because both give you a plain Ubuntu VM. Provision the new server, deploy the code from git, copy the database with a dump and import, sync uploads with rsync, then lower DNS TTL and switch. With a panel managing both providers the new server gets the identical stack, so the only real work is the data copy and the DNS change. Plan the switch for a quiet hour and keep the old server running until traffic has drained, because both providers bill by usage and an extra day costs a few cents.

If you are pricing the Droplet side more closely, our DigitalOcean pricing breakdown covers every Droplet line and add on, and App Platform vs Droplet shows when DigitalOcean's managed platform beats a Droplet plus a panel.