Choose the right place to run your stack.
Compare hosting platforms, understand infrastructure trade-offs, and check the DNS configuration behind any domain.
Compare hosting platforms.
Objective comparisons across pricing, infrastructure and developer experience — built from published documentation rather than marketing copy.
| DigitalOcean | Hetzner | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | billed per second with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher | Your server's bill will never exceed its monthly price cap. If you delete your cloud server before the end of the billing month, we will only bill you for the hourly rate. |
| Egress over allowance | $0.01 per GiB (Droplets); $0.02 per GiB (App Platform) | €1.00 per TB over the included traffic in Europe and the US; €7.40 per TB in Singapore. Billed in blocks of 100 MB, rounded up. |
| When you exceed a cap | Billed automatically — outbound transfer beyond the pooled plan allowance is charged at $0.01 per GiB; inbound transfer is free | Billed automatically — traffic beyond the amount included with the server is billed in blocks of 100MB, rounded up; Hetzner emails at 75% and 100% of the included traffic but explicitly does not cap or stop usage |
| Sites or apps included | No more than 10 Droplets can be created at the same time through the Control Panel or the API | By default, up to 5 servers (and by default up to 8 dedicated resource servers); Hetzner states default limits can be increased on request |
| File or inode limit | Up to 5000 Block Storage volumes per account | Up to 16 Volumes per server |
| Docker deployment | Supported | Limited |
Hosting decisions without marketing copy.
Every comparison is assembled from the same five dimensions, so two pages can be read against each other.
- Pricing
- Published plan pricing and the infrastructure costs underneath it, read from official pricing pages.
- Limits
- Bandwidth, compute, storage, build minutes and deployment ceilings — including the ones that only appear in the docs.
- Developer experience
- Deployments, logs, CLI, Git integration and observability, judged by what the workflow actually feels like.
- Infrastructure
- Regions, edge network, runtimes and scaling behaviour, rather than marketing claims about speed.
- Lock-in
- How much of the setup is portable, and what has to be rewritten to leave.
Every figure keeps the sentence it was read from. Flip between the two and the reduction is visible — not something to take on trust.
DigitalOcean, two ways
- When you exceed a cap
“Each Droplet plan includes an amount of free outbound data transfer. Additional outbound transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB. Inbound transfer to Droplets is free.”
Billed automatically — outbound transfer beyond the pooled plan allowance is charged at $0.01 per GiB; inbound transfer is free
Droplet Pricing | DigitalOcean Documentation · read 2026-09-05
- Entry paid plan
“512 MiB / 1 vCPU / 500 GiB transfer / 10 GiB SSD — $0.00595 /hr, $4.00 /mo”
$4.00
Droplet Pricing | DigitalOcean · read 2026-09-05
- Egress over allowance
“Droplets: Additional outbound transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB. App Platform: Additional outbound transfer is billed at $0.02 per GiB.”
$0.01 per GiB (Droplets); $0.02 per GiB (App Platform)
Bandwidth Billing | DigitalOcean Documentation · read 2026-09-05
Check the infrastructure behind any domain.
The lookup at the top of this page reads live authoritative DNS. The full tools cover every record type worth inspecting.
- A / AAAA
- CNAME
- MX
- TXT
- NS
- SOA
- CAA
- DNSSEC
- SPF
- DMARC
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Free technical utilities for checking domains, DNS records and email configuration. No account required.