DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner (2026): VPS Compared

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This is an editorial research comparison based on official documentation, pricing pages and the sources listed below — how we review. Prices and plans change often; confirm on the vendor’s site.

Status update: Hetzner raised cloud prices on April 1, 2026 and again for new orders on June 15, 2026; its Cost-Optimized CX/CAX plans are currently marked not available.

DigitalOcean, Vultr and Hetzner are three of the most common answers when a developer asks where to put a side project that has outgrown free tiers. All three rent you a virtual server by the hour or month, give you root access, and expose an API and CLI. The differences show up in the details: what the smallest useful server costs, how much traffic is included, which managed services sit next to the VPS, where the data centers are, and how stable the price list has been.

This comparison is for developers, indie hackers and small teams who are comfortable on a Linux shell and want to choose a VPS provider for a hobby app, a staging box, a self-hosted tool or a small production service. If you are still deciding whether a VPS is the right kind of hosting at all, start with our explainer on shared, VPS, cloud and managed hosting, or see the wider developer hosting comparison that covers SSH, Git deploys and staging across many kinds of hosts.

This is an editorial research article. It is based on each provider’s official pricing pages, documentation, status pages and announcements, checked on October 17, 2026, plus attributed press coverage. We did not run our own benchmarks, so you will not find speed or uptime claims here.

Quick verdict

In our assessment, there is no single winner; the right pick depends on where your users are and how much you want beyond a bare server. DigitalOcean is the most rounded platform of the three for a small team, with managed databases, managed Kubernetes, App Platform and per-second billing, at list prices that are higher than the others for a comparable small server. Vultr has the widest location list (33 regions) and the lowest entry price of the three, with a similar set of managed add-ons. Hetzner still offers very large traffic allowances and low prices in its German and Finnish locations, but 2026 brought two price increases, its lowest-cost shared plans are currently marked “not available”, and its US and Singapore servers cost much more than its EU ones.

DigitalOcean — best when you want a VPS plus managed services and predictable, capped bills.
Vultr — best when you need a specific city or the lowest entry price.
Hetzner — best when your users are in Europe and you want lots of traffic included, provided the plan you want is in stock.

At a glance

Dimension	DigitalOcean	Vultr	Hetzner Cloud
Lowest listed plan	$4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 10 GiB, 500 GiB transfer)	$2.50/mo IPv6-only (1 vCPU, 0.5 GB, 10 GB, 0.5 TB); $3.50/mo same spec without the IPv6-only label	CPX02 (EU): $7.49/mo (1 AMD vCPU, 1 GB, 20 GB) plus $0.60/mo for IPv4
2 vCPU / 4 GB shared plan	$24/mo, 80 GiB, 4,000 GiB transfer	$20/mo Regular Performance, 80 GB, 3 TB; $24/mo High Performance, 100 GB NVMe, 5 TB	CPX22 (EU): $22.99/mo, 80 GB, 20 TB, plus IPv4. CX23 (EU, 40 GB): $6.49/mo, currently not available
Billing granularity	Per second (60-second / $0.01 minimum), capped at 672 hours a month on bundled plans	Hourly, with a monthly price cap on standard plans (some lines, such as VX1, bill on actual hours)	Hourly (rounded up to a full hour), with a monthly price cap
Traffic overage	$0.01 per GiB, pooled across the team	$0.01 per GB	About $1.20 (€1.00) per TB in the EU and US; $8.30 (€7.40) per TB in Singapore
Automatic backups	20% of Droplet cost (weekly) or 30% (daily)	20% of the instance price	20% of the server price, 7 backup slots
IPv4	Included in bundled plans	Included except on IPv6-only plans	Billed separately: $0.60 (€0.50) per month
Locations	13 metro areas in North America, Europe, India, Singapore and Australia	33 regions	Germany (2), Finland, US East, US West, Singapore
Managed databases	Yes (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Valkey, OpenSearch)	Yes (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, Kafka)	Not offered for Hetzner Cloud
Managed Kubernetes	Yes (DOKS)	Yes (VKE)	No managed service; Kubernetes is supported via integrations
GPU instances	Yes (GPU Droplets, including spot in preview)	Yes (Cloud GPU and bare metal)	Not in the cloud line-up (GPU dedicated servers only)

Prices are list prices as of October 2026, in USD, excluding tax/VAT. Hetzner bills in EUR or USD depending on the currency chosen when the account was created; its EU prices shown here are for Germany and Finland.

Small-server pricing: what a side project actually costs

Comparing the lowest-priced plans is misleading, because the smallest servers differ in memory, disk and whether a public IPv4 address is included. A 2 vCPU / 4 GB shared-CPU server is a more realistic baseline for a small web app with a database on the same box.

DigitalOcean

A Basic Droplet with 2 vCPUs, 4 GiB of memory, an 80 GiB SSD and 4,000 GiB of outbound transfer lists at $24 a month ($0.03571 an hour). The smallest Droplet is $4 a month for 512 MiB, which is enough for a static site or a tiny bot but tight for most apps. DigitalOcean also documents a newer “v5” Droplet configuration, where you pay per vCPU, memory and disk, with no monthly cap and a separately listed IPv4 line item whose introductory price is currently $0.00 and “subject to change”. If you pick v5, set a spend alert, because the monthly total varies with the number of hours in the month.

Vultr

Vultr’s Regular Performance plans, which its pricing page says run on previous-generation Intel CPUs with regular SSDs, start at $2.50 a month for an IPv6-only server and reach 2 vCPUs and 4 GB for $20 a month with 80 GB of storage and 3 TB of bandwidth. The High Performance line (newer AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon CPUs with NVMe) charges $24 a month for 2 vCPUs, 4 GB, 100 GB and 5 TB. Vultr’s documentation notes that hourly or monthly rates for certain products may vary between data center locations, so check the price for your region in the control panel.

Hetzner

Hetzner’s live price data shows the shared-Intel/AMD CX23 (2 vCPUs, 4 GB, 40 GB, 20 TB of traffic in the EU) at $6.49 (€5.49) a month plus IPv4, but the Cost-Optimized page currently marks the CX and Arm-based CAX plans as “not available”. The AMD-based CPX22 (2 vCPUs, 4 GB, 80 GB) lists at $22.99 (€19.49) a month in Germany and Finland, plus $0.60 for IPv4. In the US, Hetzner lists only the CPX11–CPX51 shared line and the dedicated CCX line; a CPX21 with 3 vCPUs and 4 GB costs $37.49 a month there, with 2 TB of included traffic instead of 20 TB. Hetzner’s docs explain that US and Singapore prices are higher because operating costs there are higher.

In our assessment, Hetzner’s EU pricing remains strong on traffic allowance, but its old reputation as the obvious low-cost choice no longer holds for every plan or region. For a US-based audience, DigitalOcean and Vultr are now priced below Hetzner’s US servers for similar specs.

Billing rules and the costs that are easy to miss

Powered-off servers still cost money. DigitalOcean and Hetzner both state that you keep paying for a server until you destroy (delete) it, because the resources stay reserved. Snapshots and deletion are the way to stop billing.
Billing increments. DigitalOcean moved Droplets to per-second billing from January 1, 2026, with a 60-second or $0.01 minimum. Hetzner rounds usage up to a full hour, so many short-lived test servers cost more there than the hourly rate suggests. Vultr lists hourly prices with a monthly cap.
IPv4 is a separate line item at Hetzner. Hetzner splits public IPs from servers: IPv6 is free, while each primary IPv4 is $0.60 (€0.50) a month, and unassigned IPv4 addresses are still billed.
Traffic. DigitalOcean pools the transfer allowance of all Droplets on a team and charges $0.01 per GiB beyond it. Vultr charges $0.01 per GB over quota. Hetzner bills overage in 100 MB blocks and sends notifications at 75% and 100% of the allowance, but these do not cap usage.
Backups and snapshots. All three price automatic backups as a percentage of the server price (about 20%; DigitalOcean daily backups are 30%). Snapshots are billed per GB: $0.06/GB-month at DigitalOcean, $0.05/GB-month at Vultr, and per compressed GB at Hetzner.
Windows and add-ons. Vultr notes that Windows licenses are not included in base prices, and DDoS protection is an extra $10 a month per instance.

Price stability and availability in 2026

This is where the three diverged most this year. Hetzner announced on February 23, 2026 that prices for both existing products and new orders would rise from April 1, 2026, citing sharply higher hardware and operating costs. A second adjustment took effect on June 15, 2026 for new orders and cloud server rescales; Hetzner’s docs note that servers on legacy pricing can move to current pricing if you rescale them or transfer them to a project in a different currency. Heise reported that some cloud server prices roughly tripled in the June round, with the largest changes in Hetzner’s US locations.

Availability is a second issue. As of October 17, 2026, Hetzner’s status page shows an open “Limited availability of cloud instances” notice dating from June 26, 2026, its Cost-Optimized plans are labelled “not available”, and its location docs warn that cloud instances “may occasionally be unavailable for ordering”. If you are planning around a specific Hetzner plan, confirm you can actually create it before you commit.

We did not find an official announcement of a general 2026 price increase for DigitalOcean Droplets or Vultr Cloud Compute. DigitalOcean’s visible 2026 changes were the move to per-second billing (with its $0.01 minimum charge) and the new per-resource v5 Droplets. List prices can still change at any provider, so treat every figure here as a snapshot.

Managed services beyond the VPS

A side project often starts on one server and later needs a managed database, object storage or a container platform. This is where DigitalOcean and Vultr pull ahead of Hetzner.

DigitalOcean offers Managed Databases (PostgreSQL from $15.15 a month for 1 vCPU and 1 GiB), managed Kubernetes (Basic nodes from $12 a month per node), Spaces object storage, load balancers, App Platform for Git-based app deploys, and GPU Droplets.
Vultr offers Vultr Kubernetes Engine, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey and Kafka, block and object storage, load balancers, a CDN, bare metal, Cloud GPU and a serverless inference product.
Hetzner Cloud covers the building blocks: servers, volumes, private networks, free stateful firewalls, load balancers and S3-compatible object storage, plus one-click apps such as Docker CE, GitLab CE and Coolify. There is no managed database or managed Kubernetes in the cloud line-up, so you run those yourself.

If you would rather not manage servers at all, a platform-as-a-service may suit you better than any of these three; we compare the main options in our Render, Railway and Fly.io comparison. If you want a managed WordPress or PHP stack on top of DigitalOcean or Vultr infrastructure, see our Cloudways review. And if your project needs GPUs for model inference, our guide to GPU clouds for self-hosted AI models covers DigitalOcean’s GPU Droplets alongside specialist providers.

Locations and data residency

Vultr lists 33 cloud data center regions, the widest footprint of the three, which matters if you need a server close to users in a specific city. DigitalOcean’s regional availability docs list data centers in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Atlanta, Richmond, Kansas City, Memphis, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Singapore and Sydney, though not every product is in every data center. Hetzner owns its data center parks in Nuremberg, Falkenstein and Helsinki and uses colocation space in Ashburn, Hillsboro and Singapore; it says its US and Singapore locations are available only for cloud products.

For a European audience with GDPR concerns, Hetzner’s German and Finnish locations, run by a German company, are a common reason to choose it. DigitalOcean (Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt) and Vultr also have European regions; whether the provider’s home jurisdiction matters is a question for your own data-protection review.

Developer experience and tooling

All three offer a REST API, an official CLI (doctl, vultr-cli and hcloud), SSH-key provisioning and cloud-init user data, and all three are widely supported by Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools. DigitalOcean’s documentation and tutorial library is extensive, and its docs now include an MCP reference for AI agents. Vultr and DigitalOcean both run app marketplaces with one-click images for stacks such as Docker, WordPress and OpenLiteSpeed. Hetzner’s console is simpler, and its docs make billing rules unusually explicit, including how invoices round small amounts and when legacy prices switch to current ones.

Pricing compared (as of October 2026)

Plan type	DigitalOcean	Vultr	Hetzner Cloud
Entry server	$4/mo, 1 vCPU, 512 MiB	$2.50/mo IPv6-only or $3.50/mo, 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB	$7.49/mo + $0.60 IPv4 (CPX02, EU), 1 vCPU, 1 GB
1 vCPU / 2 GB shared	$12/mo, 50 GiB, 2,000 GiB	$10/mo, 55 GB, 2 TB (Regular); $12/mo, 50 GB NVMe, 3 TB (High Performance)	No equivalent in the EU line-up; CPX11 (US, 2 vCPU / 2 GB) $20.49/mo + IPv4
2 vCPU / 4 GB shared	$24/mo	$20/mo (Regular); $24/mo (High Performance)	$22.99/mo + IPv4 (CPX22, EU); $6.49/mo + IPv4 (CX23, EU, currently not available)
2 dedicated vCPUs / 8 GB	$63/mo (General Purpose)	$0.060/hr General Purpose VX1 with block storage (billed on actual hours)	$50.49/mo + IPv4 (CCX13, EU); $50.99/mo (US)
Backups	+20% weekly / +30% daily	+20%	+20%
Managed PostgreSQL entry	$15.15/mo	Available; check console	Not offered

All prices exclude tax/VAT and can vary by region. Hetzner’s figures are from its published live price data for Germany/Finland unless marked US, and apply to new orders after the June 15, 2026 adjustment. Prices change, so confirm them on each provider’s pricing page: DigitalOcean pricing, Vultr pricing, Hetzner Cloud plans.

Prices verified against each vendor’s official pricing page (listed under Sources). Plans, promotions and renewal prices change often — confirm on the vendor’s page before you buy.

Which should you choose?

Choose DigitalOcean if…

You want a VPS today and expect to add a managed database, Kubernetes or a Git-driven app platform later without changing providers. Per-second billing and team-pooled transfer are friendly to short-lived test servers and small fleets. Expect to pay a little more than Vultr for a similar small server.

Choose Vultr if…

You need a server in a particular city, want the lowest entry price of the three, or plan to mix shared VPSs with bare metal or GPUs on one account. Check per-region pricing, and note that its lowest-priced $2.50 plan is IPv6-only.

Choose Hetzner if…

Your users are mainly in Europe, you are comfortable running your own database, and the plan you want is actually orderable. The 20 TB EU traffic allowance is the standout. For US-hosted projects, compare carefully, because Hetzner’s US servers now cost more than similar DigitalOcean or Vultr plans and include far less traffic (1 TB on CPX11, 2 TB on CPX21).

FAQ

Are Hetzner prices shown with or without VAT?

The figures quoted here are without VAT. Hetzner lets you pick a VAT country on its site, and its price adjustment page points readers who need prices including 19% German VAT to its German price list. IPv4 addresses are billed on top of the server price.

Do I pay for a server that is switched off?

Yes, at least at DigitalOcean and Hetzner, which both say so in their billing documentation: you are billed until the server is destroyed or deleted. Take a snapshot and delete the server if you want to pause a project cheaply.

Which is easiest to grow into a full platform?

In our assessment, DigitalOcean, because it offers managed databases, managed Kubernetes and App Platform alongside Droplets in one console. Vultr offers a similar set of managed services. Hetzner focuses on infrastructure building blocks and leaves databases and Kubernetes to you.

DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner: Which VPS Is Best for Side Projects?