DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hetzner Cloud

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every plan is published with exact vCPU, RAM, SSD and transfer figures and named hardware — 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, NVMe SSDs on the optimized plans — plus a stated 99.99% SLA per data centre. What the pages never say is what that SLA pays when it is missed, and we found no public information on a public status page with incident history, HTTP/3, Redis or object caching, or failover of the platform itself. Numbers without a credit table is half an SLA, so six.

Hetzner Cloud

Websites demonstrably run here — a ready-to-use WordPress app with MySQL and Apache is documented — and there is a genuinely public status page with incident history, scheduled maintenance by data-centre selector and subscribable email notifications. But the product is stated to be unmanaged, and we found no public information on the captured pages about resources per tariff, any uptime target, an SLA paying a credit, or the hardware and storage architecture behind it. A real platform with named locations, and no numbers.

DigitalOcean Droplets

The tooling is deep and documented: four APIs, the doctl command-line client at v1.164.0, a Terraform provider, Ansible, and Git deployment from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or container registries with staging, production and preview environments, up to 10 rollback revisions and automatic OS patching. We found no public information on managed WordPress features, granular per-project roles, audit logs or single sign-on, which is what separates a strong platform from a complete one. Eight.

Hetzner Cloud

A documented console, a REST API covering servers, load balancers, volumes, firewalls, floating IPs and DNS, plus a command-line tool and Go and Python libraries — tooling you can script, not just click. One-click apps including WordPress, snapshots movable between projects, snapshot protection, restricted project members and token-based transfers complete a solid picture. We found no public information on staging copies, Git deployment workflows, audit logs or single sign-on, which keeps it below the top tier.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Backups are priced and scheduled in the open — 20% (Weekly) or 30% (Daily) of Droplet cost, usage-based plans at $0.01/GiB per month with frequencies up to every 4 hours and retention from 3 days to 6 months, plus on-demand snapshots kept indefinitely — and free cloud firewalls, DDoS mitigation, automatic SSL renewal, automatic OS patching and two-factor login are all stated. But we found no public information on a second backup location, customer self-service restore scope, malware scanning or cleanup, a web application firewall, or any security certification. Six: the schedule is honest, the recovery story is not told.

Hetzner Cloud

Daily automated backups with seven slots per server, fourteen-day encrypted retention, and on-demand snapshots that survive server deletion and land in a different location — but note the small print: attached volumes are excluded from backups and snapshots, and the vendor recommends powering the server off to get a consistent copy. Restore is rebuild-or-duplicate of the whole server; we found no public information on point-in-time, single-file or single-database recovery, a web application firewall, malware scanning, panel two-factor login or a hosting certification. The vendor is blunt that cloud servers are unmanaged and backups are the customer's responsibility, which I respect and count accordingly.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Limits are numbers rather than fair-use prose — RAM, vCPU, SSD and transfer per plan — with resize and horizontal scaling, autoscaling, and snapshots reusable to create new Droplets, on standard Linux managed through Terraform and Ansible with an S3-compatible storage API, so taking everything and leaving is technically ordinary. What is missing is the commercial exit: we found no public information on a migration service in, domain transfer out, cancellation terms, or deletion of data after termination, and the terms state "We do not offer refunds." Six.

Hetzner Cloud

A snapshot can be turned into a new server in any location, and token-based transfers of cloud servers, domains, storage boxes and rack space between customers are documented — real doors, though the domain move is stated as registrations only with the data left to move yourself, and a vSwitch is documented as not transferable at all. Beyond that we found no public information on the captured pages about resizing a server in place, tariff and resource limits, a migration service from another host, or cancellation and data-deletion terms. The exit hinges entirely on you building your own images.

DigitalOcean Droplets

A documentation library with how-to guides, tutorials and videos is published, and a Premium Support plan promises response times under 2 hours. We found no public information on ordinary support channels, hours or languages, and none on domain registration, DNS management or mailboxes in the same account. Three: a paid tier with a response figure is not support for everyone, and the domain-and-email half of this question goes unanswered on these pages.

Hetzner Cloud

A help centre, a community forum, a status page with email subscriptions and a documented support-team opening-hours page exist, and the managed-side mailboxes come with configurable storage and email-count limits, per-mailbox spam filters, retention settings and webmail. What we did not find on the captured pages: the support channels themselves, any stated response times, technical-depth promises or a partner programme. Documentation is not a promise of help.

DigitalOcean Droplets

The contracting entity is DigitalOcean, LLC with parent DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. in New York — a US group — while Droplets run in Amsterdam data centres among other regions, so EU siting exists under non-EU ownership. We found no public information on where backups are stored, the subprocessor chain, safeguards against group access to the data, or the terms of a data processing agreement. Who can reach the data is precisely the question these pages leave open; four.

Hetzner Cloud

German contracting entity in Gunzenhausen, own data centres named in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, customer master and billing data processed exclusively in the EU, backups of EU-located products staying in the EU, and a plain answer to my favourite question: only German courts for the German data centres, Finnish for Helsinki, and no direct access by US or Singaporean authorities to server contents in the EU. An Article 28 data processing agreement is published and signable in the account with a linked subprocessor list, and the technical and organisational measures are audited annually by TÜV Rheinland. What holds it back: the parent behind Hetzner Online GmbH is not stated on the captured pages, subprocessor locations are not given, and deliberately choosing a US or Singapore location puts the server data in a third country — a documented, opt-in risk.

DigitalOcean Droplets

Every plan is priced to the hour and the month with exact resources, and add-ons carry real numbers — backups at 20% (Weekly) or 30% (Daily) of Droplet cost or $0.01/GiB per month, snapshots at $0.06/GB per month — with per-second billing and a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher, stated alongside pay-as-you-go and monthly caps. We found no public information on overage pricing beyond the included transfer or on VAT treatment for business customers, and the terms state "We do not offer refunds." Seven: nearly computable, not fully.

Hetzner Cloud

The captured documentation says pricing information sits in the info box on the vendor's cloud page and states no prices itself, and no tariff price, renewal price, minimum term, setup fee, VAT treatment or price for the backup feature ever appears in what we captured. The only figure resembling billing is a notice that outstanding amounts below €10 are billed in a one-time run. A buyer cannot compute the first month's cost, let alone three years, from the captured pages.