This is certainly interesting. I've been using DO for something like 8 years and I really like them.
I don't plan to switch but Hetzner offers a CPU optimized server with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory for $17 USD / month. DigitalOcean offers the same thing for $56 USD / month. It's hard to ignore how much of a difference that is.
Even the smaller'ish instances have a huge difference. Hetzner has a 2 CPU core 4 GB of memory server for $6.75 USD / month. DO offers the same thing for $24 USD / month and that's using the worse grade CPU. If you pick the higher end AMD CPU it's $28 a month (which sounds similar to what Hetzen is using but ~4x less price). For perspective DO's $7 USD / month price point gives you 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory.
Edit: As someone brought up in the comments below, it's possible that the Hetzner price ends up being ~25% cheaper due to not charging VAT. This will depend where you live. I converted Euros to USD on Google based on their public pricing page https://www.hetzner.com/cloud as a US site visitor.
And the difference is even bigger if you get a bare metal instance.
Performance is insane if you compare it to dedicated VMs or worse cloud VMs.
In one of my Java toy projects I got http responses to sub 10ms, that's includes, querying a small amount of data from postgres and responding as JSON. The tls handshakes might have been reused through, now that I think about it. The number was taken from the network tab while switching around routes in the pwa
The bare metal instances generally have nvme storage, so you get incredible IO
As a reference from a recent test: I went with the smallest OVH bare metal server that was discounted to 30€/month the other day (normal price 60€) and got about 2k with hdparm.
Running the same test on my 45€ hetzner instance got me over 3.1k.
And the hetzner instance also got twice the memory (64gb), though that didn't impact this particular metric.
The price increase of Digital Ocean is what prompted us to evaluate different US Cloud providers in which we found Hetzner offering by far the best value [1], what's even nicer was that the prices for the instances ended up being ~25% cheaper than what they're advertising, e.g. their 4x vCPU / 8GB RAM / 160GB HDD is advertised at €17.27 but when creating instances of them in their cloud console it only ends up costing €13.10. Not sure why that is, perhaps it's the difference of their hourly vs monthly cost.
@nickjj -- That might be a difference in which VAT applies to your location. If you saw an advertisement in German, or perhaps an English ad in the UK or somewhere else in Europe, you might see a price difference similar to this if your actual region is one where we are not required to charge VAT. We also have a list of what VAT rates apply to specific locations: https://docs.hetzner.com/accounts-panel/accounts/payment-faq... --Katie
That's a good point. The USD prices in my comment were from taking the publicly listed Euro price while visiting the site in the US and converting it to USD on Google. I didn't sign up and try to create these resources. I've updated my original comment to reflect this.
That's good to know the prices are even more of a difference. Hopefully this sparks DO into being more competitively priced. If someone wants to throw up a few servers somewhere on the cloud and doesn't care about managed features, it's really hard not to consider using Hetzner for that.
I don't plan to switch but Hetzner offers a CPU optimized server with 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of memory for $17 USD / month. DigitalOcean offers the same thing for $56 USD / month. It's hard to ignore how much of a difference that is.
Even the smaller'ish instances have a huge difference. Hetzner has a 2 CPU core 4 GB of memory server for $6.75 USD / month. DO offers the same thing for $24 USD / month and that's using the worse grade CPU. If you pick the higher end AMD CPU it's $28 a month (which sounds similar to what Hetzen is using but ~4x less price). For perspective DO's $7 USD / month price point gives you 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory.
Edit: As someone brought up in the comments below, it's possible that the Hetzner price ends up being ~25% cheaper due to not charging VAT. This will depend where you live. I converted Euros to USD on Google based on their public pricing page https://www.hetzner.com/cloud as a US site visitor.