For a business whose customers are mainly in Europe, three providers come up again and again: Hetzner, the German host known for price-to-performance; DigitalOcean, the developer-friendly cloud; and AWS, the largest cloud with the deepest catalogue of managed services. Each can run a fast, secure production platform. They differ in what you pay for, what you have to run yourself, and how much control you have over where data lives. This guide compares them on the questions that actually decide the choice.
The short version
| Hetzner | DigitalOcean | AWS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best fit | Steady workloads where raw performance per euro matters, and a team (or partner) that can run the servers | Small and mid-sized teams that want simple managed databases, Kubernetes and app hosting without cloud complexity | Complex or fast-growing platforms that need many managed services, compliance programmes and global reach |
| Company and EU locations | German company; data centres in Germany and Finland | US company; European regions in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London | US company; many EU regions, plus the separate AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany |
| US locations | Cloud servers in Ashburn (US East) and Hillsboro (US West); dedicated servers only in Germany and Finland | Several US regions on both coasts | Many US regions and edge locations |
| Managed services | Few: load balancers, firewalls, volumes, object and backup storage. Databases and Kubernetes are self-managed | Managed databases, Kubernetes, App Platform, object storage and functions | Hundreds, from managed databases and queues to analytics and AI |
| Cost model | Low, predictable monthly prices with generous included traffic, but prices rose several times in 2026 | Simple, published monthly prices with included transfer | Pay per use with many dimensions; data transfer out to the internet is a significant cost line |
| Who runs the servers | You (or a managed provider) | Partly you, partly DigitalOcean | Partly you, partly AWS, depending on the services used |
1. Cost: compare the whole bill, not the server price
Hetzner is usually the cheapest of the three for raw compute and traffic, and its dedicated root servers give a lot of CPU, memory and NVMe storage for a fixed monthly price. DigitalOcean sits in the middle with simple pricing. AWS compute can look comparable, but the full bill includes storage, snapshots, load balancers, NAT gateways, monitoring and, above all, data transfer out to the internet, which often surprises teams that serve a lot of traffic.
Two cautions. First, cheap servers are not cheap if your engineers spend their time running databases, backups and failover that a managed service would handle. Second, prices change: Hetzner raised prices more than once in 2026 and some cloud lines rose far more than dedicated servers. Model your actual workload on current price lists and recheck every year.
2. EU data residency and GDPR
All three can keep personal data inside the EU if you pick EU locations and configure backups, logs and support access to stay there. The difference is the company behind the service. Hetzner is a German company, which many EU buyers and their customers find simpler to explain in a data protection assessment. DigitalOcean and AWS are US companies, so their EU regions still fall under questions about US law access, usually handled through the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses. For organisations that need stronger guarantees, AWS now runs the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a separate cloud operated in the EU by EU-resident staff, launched in Brandenburg, Germany in January 2026.
Whichever you choose, sign the provider’s data processing agreement and make the setup inside your servers compliant: encryption, access control, logging and retention. Our GDPR server and hosting checklist covers the technical measures.
3. Latency to your users
Host where most of your users are. For a European audience, Hetzner’s Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, DigitalOcean’s Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London, and AWS regions such as Frankfurt, Ireland or Paris all give low latency across most of the continent. If you also have many US customers, a single European server adds roughly 80 to 100 ms per round trip to the US East Coast and more to the West Coast. A CDN, or a second origin in the US, fixes that; our guide on making your site fast for US visitors when the server is in Europe shows how.
4. How much do you want to run yourself?
This is often the deciding question. On Hetzner you run almost everything inside the server: the operating system, database, replication, backups, monitoring and security. That gives full control and low cost, but it needs skilled people on call. DigitalOcean’s managed databases and Kubernetes remove much of that work for typical web applications. AWS can remove nearly all of it, at a higher and more complex price.
5. Lock-in and exit
Plain Linux servers, standard databases and Terraform-defined infrastructure move between providers with modest effort. The more provider-specific managed services you adopt (especially on AWS), the more work it is to leave. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it is worth knowing which parts of your platform are portable.
Common combinations
- Hetzner for the heavy lifting, a CDN in front: dedicated servers for databases and application nodes, with a CDN serving static assets and cached pages worldwide.
- AWS for the core, Hetzner for cost-heavy batch work: managed services where they save effort, cheaper compute for steady background processing.
- DigitalOcean for a small team: managed database and App Platform or Kubernetes, with little to operate.
How to decide
- List where your users and your data must be.
- List the components you would rather not run yourself (database, queue, Kubernetes, backups).
- Price the whole platform on each provider, including traffic, backups and the people needed to run it.
- Run a pilot of your real workload and measure latency from your main markets.
Get help
TechProvidence engineers build and run production platforms on all three, 24/7, with an average response under 8 minutes. See managed Hetzner services, managed DigitalOcean, managed AWS services and managed Google Cloud, or contact us for a complimentary review of your current setup or plans.
