Hetzner vs DigitalOcean vs AWS: price, performance and features compared

Hetzner wins on raw price and bandwidth, DigitalOcean wins on simplicity, and AWS wins on breadth and enterprise-grade guarantees — the right choice depends on which of those three things matters most for your workload. None of the three is objectively "best"; they're built for different buyers, and most agencies and technical teams end up running more than one.

This comparison focuses on Hetzner Cloud, DigitalOcean Droplets, and AWS EC2 — the compute products people compare most often when picking a provider for a new project.

NotePrices checked October 2026 on each provider's official pricing pages. Hetzner prices are in EUR excluding VAT; DigitalOcean and AWS prices are in USD. Cloud prices change — Hetzner raised its cloud prices on 15 June 2026 — so confirm before you budget.

How does pricing actually work on each?

All three bill compute by consumption, but the granularity and caps differ in ways that matter once you're running more than a handful of servers.

Hetzner and DigitalOcean both cap billing at a fixed monthly ceiling, so a server left running all month costs exactly the advertised monthly price. AWS On-Demand has no such cap — it's genuinely pay-as-you-go, which is great for short-lived workloads but means a forgotten large instance can run up a real bill. AWS's Free plan gives new accounts up to $200 in credits for six months; DigitalOcean typically offers time-limited signup credit instead of an ongoing free tier; Hetzner has no free compute tier.

Here's what comparable servers cost per month, running 24/7:

Hetzner prices include one primary IPv4 address (€0.50/month) and apply to new orders since the June 2026 price change; servers ordered earlier keep their old rate until they're rescaled. DigitalOcean includes a public IPv4 address in the plan price. AWS prices are On-Demand hourly rates × 730 hours, plus $0.005/hour for a public IPv4 address and excluding EBS storage. Hetzner's Cost-Optimized CX23 (2 vCPU / 4 GB) lists at €5.99 including IPv4, but Cost-Optimized plans have limited capacity and are often unavailable to order.

TipIf cost predictability matters more than elasticity, Hetzner or DigitalOcean's capped billing is easier to forecast than AWS On-Demand — reserve AWS for workloads where you'll actually use Savings Plans or Reserved Instances to control spend.

Hetzner vs AWS: which one should you choose?

For a workload that runs on a handful of servers in Europe, Hetzner is much cheaper than AWS — often half the price or less for comparable compute, with terabytes of traffic included instead of billed per GB. AWS is the better choice when you need managed services, multi-AZ resilience or a global footprint, and those save you more than the price difference.

The differences that matter:

• Price for comparable instances. A shared 2 vCPU / 4 GB server costs €19.99 a month on Hetzner against about $38.69 on AWS ($35.04 for a t3.medium plus the IPv4 charge, before storage). At 4 vCPU / 8 GB the gap widens to €35.99 versus about $152. AWS's t3 instances are also burstable: they run on CPU credits, so sustained load gets throttled or costs extra.
• Egress and bandwidth. Hetzner includes 20 TB of outbound traffic per server in Germany and Finland. AWS gives 100 GB a month free across the account, then charges $0.09 per GB in Frankfurt for the first 10 TB. Serving 5 TB a month costs about $450 in AWS data transfer alone; on Hetzner it fits inside one server's allowance.
• Regions and EU data residency. Hetzner is a German company running cloud servers in Germany and Finland (plus the US and Singapore). AWS has six EU regions — Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm, Milan and Spain — and since January 2026 the separate AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg for workloads that must be operated inside the EU.
• Managed services. AWS offers managed databases, queues, serverless functions, Kubernetes (EKS), CDN and hundreds more. Hetzner covers the basics — servers, volumes, load balancers, firewalls, private networks, object storage and DNS — but no managed databases or Kubernetes.
• Support and SLA. AWS commits to 99.99% per region for instances spread across two or more Availability Zones and 99.5% for a single instance, with paid support from $29 a month. Hetzner targets 99.9% monthly availability per cloud server, compensated as cloud credit, with ticket-based support and no paid response-time tiers.

When to pick which: choose Hetzner for steady workloads — web apps, APIs, CI runners, staging and self-hosted tools — where the bill is mostly compute and traffic. Choose AWS when its managed services save more engineering time than they cost, when you need failover across Availability Zones, or when a customer contract requires it.

How do the instance lineups compare?

AWS has by far the widest range of instance families: general-purpose (t/m), compute-optimised (c), memory-optimised (r/x), storage-optimised (i/d) and accelerated computing (p/g/inf) instances, spread across dozens of regions. That breadth is useful if you need a very specific CPU-to-RAM ratio or GPU access, but it also means more decisions and more SKUs to reason about.

DigitalOcean keeps things simpler: Basic (shared vCPU) Droplets plus General Purpose, CPU-Optimised, Memory-Optimised and Storage-Optimised lines. Hetzner Cloud is the most compact of the three — Cost-Optimized (CX on Intel/AMD, CAX on Arm), Regular Performance (CPX, shared AMD vCPUs) and General Purpose (CCX, dedicated vCPUs) cover most general-purpose needs without a huge catalogue to wade through.

Here's a rough command comparison for spinning up a similarly-specced small server (2 vCPU / 4 GB) on each, using each provider's native CLI:

# Hetzner Cloud (hcloud CLI)
hcloud server create --name web-01 --type cpx22 --image ubuntu-24.04 --location nbg1

# DigitalOcean (doctl)
doctl compute droplet create web-01 --size s-2vcpu-4gb --image ubuntu-24-04-x64 --region fra1

# AWS (aws-cli)
aws ec2 run-instances --instance-type t3.medium --image-id ami-xxxxxxxx --region eu-central-1

The syntax differs, the instance names differ, and the regional flags differ — which is exactly the kind of friction that makes multi-provider infrastructure hard to manage from separate dashboards. See our guide on how to automate DNS, SSL and server tasks across every provider for ways to abstract that away.

Which has the biggest regional footprint?

AWS operates the largest global footprint of the three — more than 30 regions, each with multiple Availability Zones — useful for regulatory data-residency requirements and for building fault-tolerant multi-AZ architectures. DigitalOcean covers 13 regions worldwide (in the EU: Amsterdam and Frankfurt) without an AZ-redundancy model. Hetzner's footprint is the smallest: Germany (Falkenstein, Nuremberg), Finland (Helsinki), the US (Ashburn, Hillsboro) and Singapore, with no multi-AZ equivalent inside a region. Its US and Singapore servers also cost more and include far less traffic than the same sizes in Europe.

If your users are mostly in Europe and you don't need AZ-level redundancy, Hetzner's footprint is entirely adequate. If you need presence across five continents or formal multi-AZ resilience, AWS is the only one of the three that delivers it natively.

Who gives you the most bandwidth for the money?

Bandwidth is where Hetzner separates itself most clearly. Hetzner Cloud servers in Germany and Finland include 20 TB of outbound traffic a month (more on the largest dedicated plans), with overage billed per TB; in the US and Singapore the allowance drops to between 0.5 TB and 8 TB depending on the plan. DigitalOcean pools each Droplet's outbound allowance across the team and bills overage at $0.01 per GiB. AWS gives 100 GB of free data transfer out per month across the whole account, then charges $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB in Frankfurt, which makes egress the most expensive of the three at any real scale — a well-known pain point for AWS-hosted media, backup and CDN-origin workloads.

WarningEgress costs are the single biggest surprise on AWS bills for teams migrating from Hetzner or DigitalOcean. Model your expected outbound traffic before committing, especially for video, backups, or high-traffic APIs.

What about SLAs and support?

AWS publishes a formal EC2 SLA: 99.99% monthly uptime per region for instances spread across two or more Availability Zones and 99.5% for an individual instance, with tiered service credits for breaches. DigitalOcean commits to 99.99% monthly uptime for each individual Droplet, with service credits if it falls short. Hetzner's Cloud SLA targets 99.9% monthly availability per cloud server on a "commercially reasonable efforts" basis, compensated as cloud credit — worth reading the exact wording before relying on it for a contractual uptime commitment to your own customers.

Support follows a similar pattern: AWS offers free Basic Support plus paid plans (Business Support+ from $29 a month, Enterprise Support from $5,000 a month) with faster response times and account management. DigitalOcean includes ticket-based support at every tier, with paid Priority/Premier tiers for faster response. Hetzner support is primarily ticket/email-based, without AWS-style paid response-time contracts.

Does managed Kubernetes change the comparison?

It shifts the economics meaningfully. AWS EKS charges $0.10 per cluster per hour (about $73 a month) for the control plane on top of worker node compute, rising to $0.60 per hour on extended version support. DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) doesn't charge for the control plane at all — you only pay for the worker Droplets, plus $40 a month if you want a high-availability control plane — which makes it noticeably cheaper for small and mid-size clusters. Hetzner doesn't offer a first-party managed control plane; teams typically self-manage Kubernetes or use community tooling like kube-hetzner on top of Hetzner Cloud servers, trading a lower infrastructure bill for more operational responsibility.

So which one should you actually pick?

• Pick Hetzner if cost-per-core, bandwidth allowance and simplicity matter most and your users are mainly in Europe or the US.
• Pick DigitalOcean if you want AWS-like managed services (databases, Kubernetes, load balancers) without AWS-like complexity or a huge SKU catalogue.
• Pick AWS if you need global multi-AZ resilience, the widest instance selection, deep managed-service integration, or enterprise procurement/compliance requirements.

Many teams don't pick one — they run production on AWS for resilience, dev/staging on Hetzner or DigitalOcean for cost, and end up with DNS, certificates and monitoring scattered across three different dashboards. That fragmentation is exactly what causes expired certificates and missed DNS changes; pairing your infrastructure choice with consistent website monitoring across every provider closes that gap.

How InfraNest fits in

InfraNest manages servers, DNS, SSL certificates and uptime monitoring across Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS and every other provider from one dashboard — so switching providers, or running several at once, doesn't mean switching tools. Hetzner users get direct integration for provisioning and management without leaving InfraNest.

Compare providers side by side and manage them all from one place with cloud server management, or connect your account directly through the Hetzner integration.