Hetzner review
If you are comfortable with SSH, Hetzner almost always gives you more machine than DigitalOcean at the same budget.
From €5.49/mo · CX23 is about 4GB RAM. No built-in WordPress panel.
Best for: VPS, side projects, people who can install a stack
Hetzner is not shared hosting. You get a virtual machine (or a dedicated server, if you go up the catalog), you install the stack, and you pay relatively little for RAM, disk, and included traffic. The company is German, the docs are drier than DigitalOcean’s, and the hardware-per-euro ratio is why developers keep recommending it in 2026.
The comparison that matters is the 4GB tier. A Hetzner CX cloud instance typically undercuts a DigitalOcean droplet with similar RAM, and the traffic allotment is more generous than the hyperscalers. If you are running an API, a bot, a staging app, or a static site behind Caddy, that gap shows up on the invoice every month.
What you do not get is a consumer control panel that hides Linux. There is a console, ISO rescue, and solid networking — but nobody is going to one-click WordPress and walk away. If that sentence made you nervous, this is the wrong row. Take Hostinger or Cloudways.
Datacenters in Europe (and US locations on cloud) make it a reasonable default if GDPR and latency to EU users matter. It is less of a default if your whole audience is on the US west coast and you wanted a managed database two clicks away.
Use Hetzner when you can patch a box. Use it as a first VPS, not as a first website host. The score is high because, for that job, almost nothing on this list is as efficient.
Pros
- One of the best performance-to-price ratios
- Generous traffic compared with AWS/DO
- GDPR-friendly datacenters in Europe and the US
Cons
- You manage the server, or add an extra panel
- Not friendly if you only want one-click WordPress