The cheap VPS landscape in October 2025: Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, Scaleway

A surprisingly thin r/devops thread from late October — “whats cheaper than AWS fargate? for container deploys” — caught my eye because of how representative it is of where heavy-hosting developers ended up in 2025. The question is innocent. The answer is “almost everything else.” After AWS, Azure, and GCP raised effective prices over the past 18 months (Fargate’s pricing, Cloud Run’s egress fees, S3 minimum durability classes), a meaningful slice of developers building real workloads ended up running their own infrastructure on cheap VPS providers again. This piece is the working ranking after six months of running the same Docker stack on four of them.

The short version: Hetzner Cloud is the best value if you’re price-sensitive and accept their feature ceiling. DigitalOcean is the right default if you want managed services and don’t mind paying 2-3x more. OVH is the European compliance option. Scaleway is the small-but-interesting third tier with specific niches.

Why this is worth revisiting in October 2025

The “I’ll just deploy to AWS” decade is ending for a non-trivial slice of developers. Three things changed in 2025:

1. Managed container pricing got expensive enough to matter. Fargate at $0.04/vCPU-hour + $0.004/GB-hour, ECS minimum charges, ALB hourly costs, NAT Gateway egress — a “small” container deployment runs $80-200/month in pure AWS infrastructure costs. The same workload runs $5-15 on Hetzner.
2. Cloud egress fees became a tax developers noticed. Even relatively small applications shipping moderate amounts of data outbound got bills in the hundreds. The “egress is free” providers (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN) created a comparison anchor that AWS and GCP didn’t have before.
3. The self-hosting / homelab community grew up. What used to be a hobbyist subculture (r/selfhosted, r/homelab) is now where a lot of serious devs go for infrastructure advice. The 519-upvote “How do you securely expose your self-hosted services” thread on r/selfhosted is full of working production setups on Hetzner, OVH, and similar.

The result: more developers in late 2025 are running production-grade workloads on €10/month Hetzner boxes than at any time in the past five years, and the tooling around doing it (Coolify, Dokku, plain Docker Compose, Cloudflare Tunnel for ingress) has matured.

Hetzner Cloud: the value leader, with caveats

Hetzner is the working price-performance champion of 2025. A CX22 (2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 40 GB disk) runs €4.51/month. The CCX23 (4 dedicated vCPU / 16 GB RAM) runs €17.04/month. For the same compute, AWS, Azure, and GCP charge 3-5x more.

What Hetzner gets right:

• Aggressive pricing on real performance. Dedicated vCPU (CCX line) is genuinely dedicated, not burstable. Network is fast. Storage is fast NVMe.
• Simple billing. Hourly rate billed monthly, no egress surprises (20TB free outbound per server per month is plenty for most workloads).
• Sensible API. Their REST API and Terraform provider are clean. You can terraform apply a fleet of cloud servers in minutes.
• Good network footprint. Germany, Finland, US (Ashburn + Hillsboro), Singapore. Latency to North America from EU customers used to be the obvious complaint; the US datacenters mostly fix that.

What Hetzner gets wrong:

• No managed databases. This is the most common pain point in 2025, captured cleanly in the r/devops “Hetzner doesn’t offer managed databases” thread. You run Postgres yourself, or you pair Hetzner with an external managed DB (Neon, Supabase, Aiven). For most use cases, “Postgres on the same VPS as the app” is fine for ≤1000 active users and is what you should default to. The “I need real managed Postgres” tier kicks in around the time you also need failover and PITR, at which point you probably also need a real managed-cloud provider for everything else.
• Account fragility. Hetzner has a reputation for being aggressive with account suspensions on perceived TOS violations (especially around crypto/scraping-adjacent workloads). Production teams should keep snapshots offsite and not put all-eggs on Hetzner.
• Customer support is asynchronous. Email/ticket, not chat. Response within 1-2 business days is the norm. Fine for non-critical workloads, not great if production is on fire.
• EU-flavored UX. German engineering for German engineers. The control panel works but isn’t as polished as DigitalOcean’s. Documentation is technically accurate but can feel terse.

For solo developers, small teams, and side projects, Hetzner is the default. For anything where the business cost of “Hetzner suspends our account” is high, factor in the operational risk.

DigitalOcean: the polished middle option

DigitalOcean’s pricing is roughly 2-3x Hetzner per unit of compute, but you get managed services that Hetzner doesn’t have: managed Postgres, managed MySQL, managed Redis, managed Kafka, App Platform, Spaces (S3-compatible). For teams that don’t want to operate their own database, DigitalOcean is the working sweet spot.

What DigitalOcean gets right:

• Managed services that work. Managed Postgres is solid, properly backed up, PITR included, easy to scale. Same for Redis, MongoDB, MySQL.
• App Platform. A Heroku-style PaaS that’s reasonably priced for small apps. Not as cheap as raw droplets but cheaper than AWS App Runner or Cloud Run for equivalent workloads.
• Polished UX. The control panel is the best in the cheap-VPS tier. Dashboards, monitoring, alerting all feel like first-class products.
• Strong community and docs. DigitalOcean’s tutorials are still the best free Linux/devops educational content on the internet. Their community ecosystem is large enough that any error message you hit, someone has hit before.
• Real customer support. Includes chat support on paid tiers, response times under an hour for paying customers.

What DigitalOcean gets wrong:

• Pricing creep. Each year their effective pricing has gotten slightly worse relative to Hetzner. They’re not where they were on price 5 years ago.
• Performance per dollar is mid-tier. Their droplets are fine but their dedicated CPU offerings are pricier than Hetzner’s CCX line for the same dedicated cores.
• Egress charges exist above the included tier. Not as punishing as AWS, but real.

DigitalOcean is the right default for teams that need managed services and operational polish without committing to AWS’s full complexity. The “what’s cheaper than AWS Fargate?” thread had multiple replies suggesting “DigitalOcean’s k8 service” and “DigitalOcean is still a cheap go-to for me” — the modal answer for that crowd.

OVH: the European compliance play

OVH is the largest European cloud provider, headquartered in France, and the right answer for workloads with strict EU data residency requirements (GDPR-heavy SaaS, public sector contracts, certain healthcare/finance regs). Their pricing is roughly Hetzner-tier on dedicated boxes and DigitalOcean-tier on the cloud product line.

What OVH gets right:

• EU data residency and compliance posture. ISO 27001, SOC 2, HDS for healthcare. Strong privacy posture relative to US clouds.
• Dedicated server offerings. Their Bare Metal Cloud line gives you real dedicated hardware at reasonable prices. Good fit for workloads where multi-tenant noisy-neighbor issues matter.
• Anti-DDoS included. OVH bundles real DDoS protection on every server, which is unusual and valuable.
• Wide European footprint. Multiple datacenters across France, Germany, Poland, UK.

What OVH gets wrong:

• Buggy control panel. OVH’s web UI has been complained about for years. It works, but it’s frustrating.
• Spotty support. Support varies wildly by tier and region. Premium support is fine; basic support is hit-or-miss.
• 2021 datacenter fire. Still in the collective memory. They’ve improved physical infrastructure but the reputational hit lingers.
• Less mature managed-service ecosystem than DigitalOcean.

For EU companies with compliance constraints, OVH is the right answer. For everyone else, they’re a viable backup tier but not the obvious choice over Hetzner or DigitalOcean.

Scaleway: the smallest, with specific niches

Scaleway is a smaller French provider that found its niche in specific corners: serverless functions, object storage, and stardust-tier nano instances. Their pricing is competitive for the things they’re good at, less competitive for general VPS workloads where Hetzner crushes them.

What Scaleway gets right:

• Stardust instances at €0.0025/hour. Cheapest hourly billing in the EU. Good for ephemeral / dev / scheduled workloads.
• Object storage pricing. Competitive with Backblaze B2 and significantly cheaper than S3.
• Serverless functions and containers. Real product, not just a wrapper. Pricing is reasonable for the sub-Cloud-Run tier.

What Scaleway gets wrong:

• Smaller footprint. Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw. No US presence. Latency to North America hurts.
• Less feature-complete than DigitalOcean. Some things are great (object storage), some things have rough edges (managed databases).
• Smaller community. Fewer Reddit threads, fewer Stack Overflow answers when you hit issues.

For specific use cases — cheap object storage, scheduled task runners — Scaleway is a sensible add-on to your stack. For primary compute, it’s the third or fourth choice.

The working recommendation by use case

After running the same Docker workload across all four providers for six months:

• Solo developer, side project, learning, MVP: Hetzner CX22 (€4.51/month). Run Postgres yourself, run the app yourself, use Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale for access. Total cost: under €10/month including Cloudflare DNS.
• Small team, production workload, want managed services: DigitalOcean droplet + managed Postgres. ~$30-50/month for small footprint, scales linearly.
• EU compliance constraints: OVH or Scaleway, depending on whether you need their full feature set or just object storage.
• Heavy data workloads or batch: Hetzner CCX line (4-8 dedicated vCPU at €17-34/month) is unbeatable for raw compute per dollar.
• Need real customer support: DigitalOcean’s paid tier. Hetzner support exists but is slower.
• Need real managed databases: Pair Hetzner cheap compute with Neon, Supabase, or Aiven for the database tier — it’s still cheaper than DigitalOcean’s bundled solution at small scale.

What the YouTube creators actually walked through this fall

The most useful current-pricing video is WEBdoze’s “Hetzner’s NEW €3.49 VPS: Too Cheap to Be True?” (17 min, October 17 2025) — the launch coverage of Hetzner’s new shared-CPU cost-optimised tier that landed two weeks before this article. His specific finding is the one worth quoting because it changes the cost equation: the new shared-CPU tier is roughly 50% cheaper than the equivalent dedicated tier for sizes where the noisy-neighbour risk is acceptable. His example: an 8 vCPU / 16 GB server runs €20/month on the regular tier and €9.50/month on cost-optimised. For a non-latency-critical workload that just needs cores and RAM (background jobs, build runners, dev environments), that math meaningfully widens Hetzner’s already-large lead. The cost-optimised tier is only available in Germany and Finland for now, so the location constraint is real — but for European-traffic workloads, it is the new default tier.

Dmitry Lambert’s “Stop Overpaying for VPS — Hetzner Cloud Review” (13 min, 16K views, May 2025) is the longer story of why developers actually switched. His comparison: AWS EC2 T4G small (2 vCPU / 2 GB) is “on demand basically $12 — but that’s without the storage.” DigitalOcean’s equivalent droplet is “$18 — well, this one includes 60 GB SSD.” Hetzner gives you the equivalent at €4-6/month inclusive. The reason the comparison shifts so hard is that Hetzner’s pricing is roughly the all-in price including reasonable storage and bandwidth, while AWS and DigitalOcean’s headline pricing is the base before the line items add up. His walkthrough of project organisation, shared-vs-dedicated CPU selection, and IPv6 toggling matches the modal Hetzner-new-user experience and is the right video to send someone considering the switch.

Cybernews’ “BEST Cheap VPS in 2026 — TOP VPS providers reviewed” (8 min, 44K views) is the broader-market overview but its take aligns with the Reddit data: Hetzner first, DigitalOcean second for managed services, OVH for EU compliance, smaller providers for specific niches.

What the YouTube tutorials usually skip

Even the better videos go through pricing and specs without fully landing the operational concerns. The Reddit reality is that operational concerns matter more than spec sheet differences for most teams. Hetzner’s account-suspension risk, DigitalOcean’s pricing creep, OVH’s control panel friction, Scaleway’s smaller footprint — these are not on the spec sheet but they shape what is actually pleasant to run on year over year.

The other thing YouTube reviews almost universally skip: the “what about managed databases” question. It is the single biggest decision factor for serious teams choosing between Hetzner and DigitalOcean, and it is almost never the headline of a comparison video. Reddit threads — including the Hetzner managed-DB question on r/devops — surface it as the consistent gotcha. WEBdoze’s cost-optimised tier walkthrough does not mention it. Lambert’s review does not mention it. The “Hetzner is amazing” creator consensus is broadly correct but operationally incomplete.

The verdict

If you’re starting fresh in October 2025 and the only constraint is “host a web app cheaply with good performance”:

Hetzner CX22 (€4.51/mo) + Cloudflare Tunnel + Postgres on the same box. Under €10/month total. That’s the entire stack for 90% of side projects and many production small-team apps.

If you outgrow that, the migration path is straightforward: scale up to a CCX23 (€17/mo) for more dedicated cores, externalize Postgres to Neon or Supabase, add a second Hetzner box in a different region for failover. You’ll be at $40-60/month total for a setup that would cost $200-400 on AWS Fargate + RDS.

The decade of “just throw it on AWS” is closing. AWS is still the right answer for some workloads (heavy IAM, multi-account governance, specific managed services). But for the long tail of small-team and solo-developer apps, the cheap-VPS providers have won on cost, and the operational tooling has caught up enough that the AWS convenience tax isn’t paying off the way it used to.