DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hetzner Cloud

DigitalOcean Droplets

Each plan's vCPUs, RAM, SSD or NVMe storage and transfer allowance are published, the hardware is named down to 5th Gen AMD EPYC and NVMe on the storage plans, and a 99.99% SLA is stated for every data centre with a 99.95% SLA for the app platform. We found no public information on a status page with incident history, on service credits behind the SLA, or on replicated storage and failover, so the reliability claim rests on the SLA figures alone.

Hetzner Cloud

A public status page with incident history and scheduled maintenance selectable by data centre is documented, including resolved outages and current work on core routers. We found no public information on per-tariff resources, an uptime target or an SLA with service credits, caching, PHP versions or a CDN in the captured pages.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Day-to-day management runs through a console, the doctl command-line tool, four documented APIs and Terraform and Ansible support, which covers the infrastructure-as-code needs of our agencies. Deployments from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket with staging, production and preview environments, automatic OS patching and rollbacks of up to ten revisions are documented for the app platform. We found no public information on granular roles per project or on transferring a project to a client.

Hetzner Cloud

The console deploys one-click apps including a ready-to-use WordPress with MySQL and Apache, alongside Coolify, Docker CE and GitLab CE, and covers snapshots, firewalls, volumes, private networks and placement groups. A documented API for servers, load balancers, volumes, firewalls, floating IPs, placement groups and DNS comes with the hcloud command line tool and Go and Python libraries, plus separate APIs for dedicated servers and storage boxes. Projects support member invitations with role-based permissions over backups and snapshots, and servers, snapshots, storage boxes and domains can be transferred to other customers; we found no public information on managed automatic updates, staging environments or Git deployment.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Free cloud firewalls, DDoS protection, two-factor login and SSL certificates that are created and renewed for you are documented, and the backup options are flexible: weekly at 20% or daily at 30% of the Droplet cost, usage-based plans up to every four hours with retention from three days to six months, and on-demand snapshots kept indefinitely. What I check first before signing for practices and law firms — self-service restore of single files, where the backup copies are physically kept, and a certification such as ISO 27001 — we found no public information on, though pages on restoring individual files and on trust and security were among those captured.

Hetzner Cloud

Daily encrypted server backups with 14-day retention across seven slots, manual snapshots that survive server deletion, restore by rebuilding the server or creating a duplicate in any location, and cloud firewalls are documented, and the technical and organisational measures are audited annually by TÜV Rheinland. The vendor states that cloud servers are unmanaged products and that setting up backups is the customer's responsibility, and restore is at the level of the whole server rather than single files or databases. We found no public information on a web application firewall, malware scanning or cleanup, DDoS protection, two-factor login to the panel, or an ISO 27001 or BSI C5 certification.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Growing is well documented: Droplets can be resized or scaled horizontally behind a managed load balancer, autoscaling is available, vCPU, memory and storage are chosen independently on v5 plans, and every transfer and storage limit is stated in plain figures. The exit side is thin: we found no public information on a migration service from another host, export in standard formats, domain transfer out, cancellation periods, or deletion of data after the contract ends — and the published policy is "We do not offer refunds."

Hetzner Cloud

The servers run standard open stacks such as WordPress with MySQL and Apache under full root access, snapshots and backups restore to any location and move between projects, and domain transfer out is documented via a token valid for 7 days, with servers, storage boxes and rack space transferable between customers. We found no public information on cancellation periods, deletion of data after the contract ends, a migration service from another host, or scaling resources without moving the server.

DigitalOcean Droplets

A premium support plan with response times under two hours and a resource library of how-to guides, tutorials and videos are documented. Beyond that we found no public information on support channels, hours or languages despite the captured support page, and no public information on domains or mailboxes bookable in the same account — for practices that need appointment-confirmation mail, that gap matters.

Hetzner Cloud

A searchable documentation centre, a community forum, email notifications for product status reports and a documented topic on support opening hours exist, and mailboxes are documented with configurable storage and per-email size and count limits, per-mailbox spam filtering, forwarding to additional addresses, retention settings and webmail, alongside domain handling. We found no public information on support channels such as phone or chat with stated hours, response times, help with hacked sites, a premium support tier or a partner programme.

DigitalOcean Droplets

The contracting party is DigitalOcean, LLC — notices to Broomfield, Colorado — under parent DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. of New York, so the head of the chain sits outside the EU; Amsterdam regions are named alongside San Francisco ones, so EU hosting is available, though nothing pins customer data to it. For the rest of the chain I could verify nothing: we found no public information on the subprocessors and their locations, on safeguards against access by the US parent, or on data-centre certifications, even though pages for a data processing agreement, a privacy policy and a subprocessor list were among those captured.

Hetzner Cloud

The contracting entity is Hetzner Online GmbH in Gunzenhausen with its own data centres in Falkenstein, Nürnberg and Helsinki; customer, contract and billing data are processed exclusively in the EU, backups stay in the EU when an EU location is chosen, and authority requests for the German sites are accepted only from German courts with a valid order and for Helsinki only from Finnish ones. An Article 28 data processing agreement is published in German and English together with a subprocessor list, master data are not passed to the US subsidiary, only data a customer actively stores on a US or Singapore server reaches those countries, and US or Singaporean authorities have no direct access to EU server contents. The subprocessor list is published without the subprocessors' locations on the pages we read, and we found no public information on an ISO 27001 or BSI C5 certification for the data centres, though an annual TÜV Rheinland audit of the technical and organisational measures is documented with the report available to customers who concluded the agreement.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every plan is priced hourly and monthly side by side, from $4.00 a month for 512 MiB to $2,096.00 for the largest storage plan, with backups at 20% weekly or 30% daily of the Droplet cost, usage-based backups at $0.01/GiB per month, snapshots at $0.06/GB per month and per-second billing with a 60-second minimum. Two items a practice needs before signing we could not find: the rate for bandwidth beyond the included 500 GiB per month, and the VAT treatment for business customers.

Hetzner Cloud

The cloud documentation directs buyers to pricing in the info boxes on the cloud page, yet the captured pages contain no tariff price, minimum term, setup fee, included services, add-on cost or VAT treatment. We found no public information on renewal prices or cancellation terms in the pages we read.