DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hetzner Cloud

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every plan is specified to the last gigabyte — vCPUs, RAM, SSD storage and monthly transfer — with hardware actually named (NVMe on storage-optimized and premium tiers, 5th-Gen AMD EPYC on v5), a 99.99% uptime SLA per data centre, highly available managed load balancers and free monitoring with alerts. That tells me exactly what box my shop runs on. We found no public information in the captured pages on the service credit terms behind the SLA, a status page with incident history, or how the storage is replicated.

Hetzner Cloud

There is a public status page with incident history and maintenance notices down to individual data centres, and the WordPress app ships with Let's Encrypt support; for a Black Friday weekend I would lean on the documented load balancers, floating IPs and volumes. But the captured pages show no CPU or RAM per tariff, no caching, no PHP versions and no uptime guarantee, so the resources underneath my shop remain invisible to me from public evidence.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Day-to-day operations are documented through a console, the doctl command line, four APIs and a Terraform provider with Ansible support, plus free snapshots, cloud firewalls, reserved IPs and team management with two-factor login — a real operations stack for running a shop. We found no public information on staging copies or cloning for the Droplets product itself, granular roles per project, or audit logs in the pages we read.

Hetzner Cloud

The Hetzner Console, a ready WordPress image including MySQL and Apache2, and a documented REST API with the hcloud command line plus Go and Python libraries covering servers, load balancers, volumes, firewalls, floating IPs and DNS give me real control as a hands-on operator. Snapshots are manageable with user permissions, and project members can be invited per project. I found no public information on staging environments, Git deployment, managed updates or agency and client-management features.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Backups are flexible and priced three ways — weekly at 20% of the Droplet cost, daily at 30%, or usage-based from $0.01/GiB per month with frequency up to every 4 hours and retention from 3 days to 6 months, plus on-demand snapshots kept indefinitely — which on paper covers my 'yesterday's database back' need, and cloud firewalls, two-factor login and free monitoring come included. We found no public information in the captured facts on off-site backup copies, point-in-time restore of single files or databases, malware scanning or certifications; note the automatic SSL, DDoS protection and OS patching statements are made for the App Platform product, not the Droplets themselves.

Hetzner Cloud

Daily encrypted backups kept 14 days with seven slots per server, on-demand snapshots that survive server deletion, restore to any location by rebuilding the server, cloud firewalls and technical measures audited yearly by TÜV Rheinland are documented. For my worst case the picture is thinner: only whole-disk restore is described, not a restore of single files, databases or tables within the hour, and a data-protection page tells cloud customers that backups are theirs to set up on these unmanaged servers. I found no public information on malware scanning, a web application firewall, DDoS protection or two-factor login.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Resizing a Droplet or scaling horizontally behind managed load balancers, with every limit stated as a concrete number instead of 'unlimited', and hourly plus monthly billing with per-second granularity — that is exactly the pattern to absorb a Black Friday weekend and shrink afterwards without moving the shop. Snapshots kept indefinitely and usable to create new Droplets, plus S3-compatible object storage, give a standard-tooling exit path. We found no public information on a migration service in, domain transfer out, or deletion of data after termination.

Hetzner Cloud

Backups and snapshots can create a server in any location, so growth or a move is at least technically open, and limits such as seven backup slots per server and thirty snapshots are published. Domains transfer out by token valid seven days, cloud servers move between projects, and the vendor will manually transfer domain registrations only as a goodwill gesture, with the data left for me to move. I found no public information on tariff changes without a migration, a migration service from another host, full export or cancellation terms.

DigitalOcean Droplets

There is a rich library of how-to guides, tutorials and videos, and a Premium Support plan promising response times under 2 hours, which is what I would want during a sales weekend. Beyond that we found no public information on support channels, hours or languages in the captured facts, and no domains or mailboxes offered in the same account.

Hetzner Cloud

Mailboxes are documented in real detail — storage and per-email limits, spam filtering with per-mailbox overrides, webmail, forwarding and retention settings for spam and trash — and a Support Team opening-hours page, help centre, community forum and status page exist, with domains transferable in the same account. What decides it for a shop: response times, phone or chat channels and technical depth for a shop system or a hacked site are not shown on the captured pages.

DigitalOcean Droplets

I can place my shop in Amsterdam — three Amsterdam regions are documented alongside US locations — but the party to the terms is the US-based DigitalOcean, LLC under DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. of New York, so the contracting chain is American. Privacy policy, data processing agreement and subprocessor pages were captured, yet their contents are not evidenced here, so where backups sit and which non-EU group companies can reach my data remain unknown to me.

Hetzner Cloud

The chain is provably European where I need it: Hetzner Online GmbH in Gunzenhausen stays the contracting entity even for the optional US and Singapore locations, the EU cloud locations Falkenstein, Nürnberg and Helsinki run in the company's own data centres, master and billing data stay in the EU, and with an EU location the backups stay in the EU too. A subprocessor list, an Art. 28 data processing agreement and technical measures audited annually by TÜV Rheinland are published, and only German or Finnish authorities with a valid court order reach the EU data centres. What I did not find: ISO 27001 or BSI C5 certification with its scope on the captured pages.

DigitalOcean Droplets

The pricing page lets me compute the bill: every size from 512 MiB/1 vCPU at $4.00 a month up to 96 GiB/48 vCPUs at $1,008.00 carries vCPUs, RAM, SSD and transfer with hourly and monthly figures side by side, backups cost 20% or 30% of the Droplet or $0.01/GiB usage-based, snapshots are $0.06/GB per month, and per-second billing with its minimum charge is spelled out — my three-year compute cost is derivable. Still open for a shop on a budget: the transfer overage rate, the price of Premium Support and VAT treatment are not stated in the captured facts, and the refund policy reads "We do not offer refunds."

Hetzner Cloud

The captured pages show no prices; the documentation only points to a pricing info box on hetzner.com/cloud, and a billing notice about amounts below €10 is the closest thing to cost information I found. I found no public information on renewal terms, what backups, snapshots or restores cost, add-on pricing or VAT treatment, so for a shop with seasonal spikes I cannot budget a year from what was captured.