DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hetzner Cloud

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every Droplet size is published with its vCPU, RAM, SSD or NVMe storage and monthly transfer allowance, right up to a 96 GiB RAM machine, with 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors named and a 99.99% uptime SLA on the product. What my WordPress clients would miss is the managed layer: we found no public information on PHP versions, caching or a CDN on the servers themselves, nor on a status page with incident history or credits behind the SLA.

Hetzner Cloud

There is a public status page with full incident history, a maintenance planner down to individual data-centre halls, and per-product email notifications — transparency I genuinely value. Own data centres in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki are named, and backups and snapshots are stored in a different data centre. We found no public information on resources per tariff, PHP versions, caching, a CDN or an uptime commitment with credits, so I cannot judge what sixty client sites would actually run on.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Management is infrastructure-first and genuinely strong: a UI, the doctl CLI, four documented APIs, a Terraform provider, on-demand snapshots I can keep indefinitely, free cloud firewalls and unlimited team members with two-factor. The agency layer is where it thins out — we found no public information on WordPress tooling, staging and push-to-live, per-project roles for freelancers, or handing a client their project, so my team would be assembling the stack ourselves on raw VMs.

Hetzner Cloud

A console plus a documented REST API and a command-line tool covering servers, volumes, firewalls, private networks, load balancers and DNS is exactly the automation my team could build on, and WordPress ships as a one-click app with MySQL, Apache2 and Let's Encrypt. Projects, restricted users with permissions, and handing a cloud server or snapshot to another person's project are documented. We found no public information on staging with push to live, automatic updates with rollback, or an agency view with client billing handover — the things my WordPress maintenance day is made of.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Backups are concrete and priced — weekly at 20% or daily at 30% of the Droplet cost, or usage-based with frequency up to every 4 hours — and free cloud firewalls, DDoS protection and two-factor on the team account are documented. But recovery is what an agency lives on, and we found no public information on self-service restore of files or databases, malware cleanup, isolation between customers or security certifications.

Hetzner Cloud

Daily backups with seven slots per server, manual snapshots that never auto-delete and survive server deletion, restore by rebuild or as a duplicate server, cloud firewalls and free certificates via Let's Encrypt are documented, and snapshots sit in a different location. Restores are whole-server only, and we found no public information on point-in-time restore of single files, databases or tables, on malware scanning or cleanup, a web application firewall, two-factor login, or an ISO 27001-type certification. One page also describes these cloud servers as unmanaged products with backup setup the customer's responsibility, so my staff own that discipline.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Limits are honest numbers on every plan with no unlimited promises, a Droplet can be resized or scaled horizontally, block storage attaches on demand, and billing is monthly or per-second pay-as-you-go, so there is no long term to escape. The exit side is thin: we found no public information on a migration service in, export of domains and mail, or the deadline for deleting data after cancellation.

Hetzner Cloud

Handovers are documented: a cloud server moves to another person's project, domains transfer via a token valid seven days, storage boxes move between shared projects, and a backup or snapshot rebuilds into a server in any location — genuinely useful when I hand a finished project to a client. Volumes and load balancers in the API give growth headroom. We found no public information on changing tariffs without a migration, a migration service from another host, complete export of data, or the cancellation terms.

DigitalOcean Droplets

A Premium Support plan with response times under 2 hours and a library of guides, tutorials and videos is more than a forum, but we found no public information on the everyday support channels, hours or languages behind it. For my sixty clients there is also nothing on domains or mailboxes in the same account, so mail would live with a second vendor.

Hetzner Cloud

Support opening hours are documented, a community forum exists, and customers can subscribe to status email notifications; mailboxes in the konsoleH panel offer configurable storage and per-email size limits, forwarding copies, per-mailbox spam filters over global black- and whitelists, retention settings and webmail — a solid mail feature set for client addresses. We found no public information on support channels such as phone or chat, response times, help with hacked or broken sites, or an agency and partner programme.

DigitalOcean Droplets

The contracting entity is DigitalOcean, LLC, an American company, and Amsterdam appears among the data centre regions, but the pages prove little beyond that: we found no public information on where a given customer's data and backups sit, which subprocessors are involved, or what the data processing agreement covers. When a client asks me where their data actually lives, I could not answer from this.

Hetzner Cloud

Cloud locations Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki run in Hetzner's own data centres under the German Hetzner Online GmbH, with a published data processing agreement and subprocessor list, an annual TÜV Rheinland audit of the technical measures, EU-only processing of customer master and billing data, and backups remaining in the EU for EU locations. Authority requests for the German sites are accepted only from German courts, Finnish for Helsinki, with no direct US or Singapore authority access to EU server data; server data reaches a third country only if the customer actively picks the US or Singapore location, and the vendor states this openly. We found no public information on data-centre certifications such as ISO 27001 or BSI C5, and the subprocessor locations themselves are not shown.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every Droplet size carries its hourly and monthly price side by side — 4 GiB RAM, 2 vCPU, 80 GiB SSD at $24.00 — with backups at 20% or 30% of the Droplet cost, snapshots at $0.06/GB per month, and monthly or per-second pay-as-you-go billing, so there is no first-year price that doubles later. Two gaps keep it from full clarity: we found no public information on bandwidth overage rates beyond the included transfer or on VAT treatment, and the refund line reads "We do not offer refunds."

Hetzner Cloud

The only pricing statement we found is a pointer to the info box on the cloud product page, and the sole billing figure anywhere is a notice about one-time billing of outstanding amounts below €10. We found no public information on tariff figures, minimum terms, renewal prices, setup fees or the cost of the backup add-on — for budgeting sixty client sites I could not compute even one server's yearly cost from what is published here.