DigitalOcean App Platform vs Hetzner Cloud
Pricing
DigitalOcean App Platform: Free for static sites, from $5/mo for apps
Hetzner Cloud: Servers from EUR 5.49/mo excl. VAT and IPv4, billed hourly
Description
DigitalOcean App Platform: Simple cloud hosting with managed infrastructure: deploy from GitHub without touching servers
Hetzner Cloud: German cloud provider renting virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore
Pros
- Predictable pricing with no surprise bandwidth bills: $5/month gets you a real server
- Free static site hosting with 3 static sites included
- Backed by a public company (since 2021): low risk of shutting down
- Servers in the EU include 20 TB of traffic a month
- Hourly billing with a monthly cap: delete a server mid-month and you pay only for the hours used
- Firewalls at no extra cost, private networks, a REST API, a CLI and Terraform support
Cons
- App Platform is less polished than Vercel or Railway for developer experience
- Fewer framework auto-detections: you often need to configure build commands manually
- Scaling is manual unless you set up additional configuration
- The cheapest Cost-Optimized servers (from EUR 5.49/mo) are marked as not available on Hetzner's site
- Prices rose on 15 June 2026: the 2 vCPU, 4 GB CPX22 went from EUR 7.99 to EUR 19.49 a month in Germany and Finland
- Servers come unmanaged: you install, update and secure them yourself
Details
DigitalOcean has been around since 2011 and went public in 2021. The App Platform is their answer to Heroku and Render: connect a GitHub repo, pick your runtime, deploy. It is not the slickest developer experience, but it is reliable and the pricing is transparent. A $5/month Basic instance runs a small app without the billing surprises that come with usage-based platforms.
The sweet spot for solo founders is pairing App Platform with DigitalOcean’s managed databases ($15/month for Postgres). You get a production-grade setup for $20/month total with clear, fixed pricing. The downside is less magic: where Vercel auto-detects your Next.js settings and Railway auto-provisions databases, DigitalOcean expects you to configure things yourself. If you value predictability over convenience, that is a reasonable trade.
Hetzner rents virtual servers by the hour from data centres in Falkenstein and Nuremberg (Germany), Helsinki, two US locations and Singapore. You pick a size and an operating system such as Ubuntu or Debian, and the server is ready in seconds. You can run a self-hosting tool such as Coolify on top of it.
It suits founders who are comfortable running a Linux server. There are three lines: Cost-Optimized (shared CPUs, the cheapest), Regular Performance (shared AMD CPUs on newer hardware) and General Purpose (dedicated vCPUs).
Read the prices carefully. Hetzner’s June 2026 price list puts the CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk) at EUR 5.49 a month and the CPX22 at EUR 19.49, both excluding VAT and the IPv4 address, and the Cost-Optimized line is currently shown as not available. Singapore servers cost more and include only 0.5 TB of traffic.
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