Hetzner and DigitalOcean Alternatives for UK & EU Projects

Hetzner and DigitalOcean are two of the first names people try when they need a server, and for good reasons. Hetzner is a German hosting company known for low-cost servers. DigitalOcean is a developer-focused cloud platform with a clean interface, an API and a lot of tutorials. If you are looking for a Hetzner alternative or a DigitalOcean alternative, it is usually not because either is bad. It is because something about the fit is wrong for your project: where the server sits, how you are billed, how support works, or how much of the server you want to run yourself.

We sell VPS hosting, so we are not neutral. This post is a checklist you can apply to any provider, us included, with an honest section on when Hetzner or DigitalOcean is the better choice and the commands to test a server yourself rather than trusting anyone's marketing.

Why people look for an alternative

Location and latency

For a UK or EU audience, the distance between your users and your server is the one thing you cannot optimise later in code. A shop in Manchester or an API used by clients in Paris and Berlin feels quicker when the round trip is short. Every provider lists its regions; what matters is the route from your users' networks, which you can measure (see below).

Data location also matters for GDPR paperwork. Many organisations simply prefer, or are asked by clients, to keep personal data on servers inside the EU.

Billing currency and VAT

Check what currency you will be invoiced in, whether VAT is added at checkout or already included, and whether the invoice works for your accounts. A price that looks lower before VAT can end up level with one that already includes it. If your accounts are kept in pounds or euros, a dollar invoice means a small exchange-rate movement each month; some people mind, many do not.

Support model

Large platforms tend to rely on documentation, community answers and ticket queues, with faster or more personal support often sold as a tier. Smaller providers are often the reverse: fewer self-service extras, but a person reading your ticket. Neither is wrong. Decide which you will actually use at two in the morning when a site is down.

Panels and managed options

A raw VPS gives you root and nothing else. Some people want exactly that. Others want a hosting control panel, or want someone else to patch the server, run backups and answer for the web stack. Check whether the provider offers a managed tier, what it covers, and whether a panel licence can be added.

How pricing is structured

Three things change the real monthly cost more than the headline price:

• Hourly vs monthly. Hourly billing is ideal for servers you create and destroy often. For a server that runs all year, monthly or yearly billing is simpler to budget.
• Traffic and egress. Some providers include a traffic allowance and charge beyond it; others do not meter. If you serve downloads, media or backups out of the server, this is the line to read.
• Backups. Snapshots and backups are sometimes included and sometimes an add-on priced as a percentage of the server. Add it to the comparison, because you should not run a production server without one.

If you are still deciding between shared hosting, a VPS and a dedicated server, start with what a VPS is and come back.

A DigitalOcean alternative checklist (that also works for Hetzner)

Fill this table in for every provider on your shortlist. We have filled in our column from our own product facts. For Hetzner and DigitalOcean we deliberately do not quote figures: their plans, regions and prices change, and you should read them at the source on the day you decide.

Hetzner's current offer is on its cloud page and DigitalOcean's on its Droplet pricing page. Read the small print on traffic and backups on both, the same way you should read ours on the Cloud VPS page.

When Hetzner or DigitalOcean is the better choice

Be honest with yourself about what the project needs. One of them is likely the better fit if:

• You need hourly billing. If you spin up servers for a CI job, a load test or a weekend experiment and delete them afterwards, a provider that offers hourly billing suits you better. We bill monthly or yearly only.
• You need several regions. If your users are spread across continents and you want servers near each group, a provider with many regions is the right call. We run from one datacenter in France.
• You need a wider platform. Managed databases, object storage, load balancers, Kubernetes and a large API under one account are what developer clouds are built for. If your architecture depends on those services, keep it in one place.
• You want the lowest possible price for a large fleet. Hetzner's reputation for low-cost servers is well earned. Compare like for like, including VAT, traffic and backups, and if it still wins on your numbers, take it.
• Your team already knows the platform. Tooling, Terraform modules and muscle memory are worth money. Moving for a small saving rarely pays.

Where we tend to fit: a project aimed at UK and EU users that runs all year on one or a few servers, where you want unmetered traffic, a snapshot included, a price that already includes VAT, and either full root on a Cloud VPS or a server we manage for you on a Managed VPS. The same applies to single-purpose servers such as self-hosted automation on n8n hosting.

How to test latency yourself

Do not trust latency figures in anyone's marketing, ours included. Measure from the networks your users are on: your office, your home broadband, a mobile hotspot, and a server you already have elsewhere.

Our looking glass runs ping, traceroute and MTR from our network over IPv4 or IPv6, and has 100 MB and 1 GB test files. To test in the other direction, from your machine to us:

# Round-trip time, 20 packets, IPv4 and IPv6
ping -c 20 46.105.47.141
ping -6 -c 20 2001:41d0:a:7213::141

# Per-hop loss and latency, report mode
mtr --report --report-cycles 100 46.105.47.141

# Download speed from the test file
curl -o /dev/null -w 'avg speed: %{speed_download} bytes/s\n' \
  https://lg.vpspioneer.com/100MB.test

Run the same commands against each provider's own test endpoints or looking glass, at different times of day. Look at the average and the worst result, and at the MTR output for loss on the final hops. Loss on a middle hop that does not carry through to the end is usually a router de-prioritising ping replies, not a real problem.

If you already have a server somewhere, iperf3 gives a better throughput figure than a file download:

iperf3 -c 46.105.47.141 -p 5201
iperf3 -6 -c 2001:41d0:a:7213::141 -p 5201

How to benchmark a VPS quickly

Once you have a trial server from each shortlisted provider, spend fifteen minutes on the same tests on each. Use the same OS image and plan size, run each test three times, and write the numbers down. We will not quote results here, because a benchmark only means something on your own workload and at the time you run it.

Install the tools on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y fio sysbench mtr-tiny iperf3

CPU, single thread and all threads:

sysbench cpu --threads=1 --time=30 run
sysbench cpu --threads=$(nproc) --time=30 run

Memory throughput:

sysbench memory --memory-block-size=1M --memory-total-size=20G run

Disk, random 4K reads and writes, which is what a database feels:

fio --name=randrw --filename=/root/fio.test --size=2G \
    --rw=randrw --rwmixread=70 --bs=4k --iodepth=32 \
    --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --runtime=60 --time_based \
    --group_reporting
rm /root/fio.test

Disk, sequential throughput:

fio --name=seqread --filename=/root/fio.test --size=2G \
    --rw=read --bs=1M --iodepth=16 --ioengine=libaio \
    --direct=1 --runtime=30 --time_based
rm /root/fio.test

The fio documentation explains every option, and sysbench has its own test reference. Two cautions: VPS vCores are usually fair-share, ours included, so results vary with time of day; and synthetic numbers are a sanity check, not a verdict. The best test is to deploy your actual application and watch response times for a week. If you are unsure whether a VPS is the right tier at all, our guide to shared vs VPS vs dedicated walks through the trade-offs.

Things that are easy to forget

• Status history. Check whether the provider publishes incidents and maintenance openly. Ours is on the status page, with scheduled maintenance and 90-day uptime.
• Outgoing mail. Many providers block SMTP ports on new servers. We block ports 25, 465 and 587 by default and open them on request for legitimate use; HTTP mail APIs such as Postmark, SendGrid and SES work either way.
• Resizing. Ask how an upgrade works and whether you can go back down. On our Cloud VPS you open a ticket, the server moves to the next size with its disk and IP, and it needs a short reboot.
• Who does what. On any self-managed VPS, OS updates, firewall, SSH hardening, SSL and monitoring are your job. If that is not how you want to spend your evenings, price a managed option alongside the raw server.

Shortlist two or three providers, fill in the table, run the tests from your users' networks, and let the numbers decide. If we end up second, at least you will know why.

Frequently asked questions