This article reviews Hetzner, a VPS provider that offers affordable and reliable cloud servers for hosting websites and applications. It shows how Hetzner performs in terms of disk, CPU, network, and WordPress tests, and compares it with other VPS providers such as DigitalOcean. It also shows the interface and support of Hetzner, and gives some opinions and conclusions based on the experience and results.
I like hosting my websites on a VPS as it is faster and cheaper, I am tech person and I find it easy to manage a VPS server. Along the time I have written and made videos of how you can install various hosting panels on all of this VPS, I have tried all the VPS providers from this article with panels like CloudPanel or CyberPanel or WordOps.
In this article we will see how the 3 services compare and see what performance is offering for it’s VPS services. I am going to create a VPS on the each of the 3 services DigitalOcean, Vultr or Hetzner install CloudPanel and WordPress and benchmark and speed test the VPS and WordPress.
The VPS server will be created as similar as possible meaning the same number of CPU and Memory in near locations to test the speed of the website. I will create Intel and AMD servers to see also how they are comparing among themself.
At the end you will find the conclusion and my opinion.
In this section we are going to run a couple of tests against all of the 3 services to see which one is the best. The test will be:
The created VPS servers used for test were as below with the pricing for it, the datacenters were in the East cost for all.
All the server except Hetzner which has only 1 option has tested the premium ones. Now let’s see how all are.
yabs.sh is used for this test and all the server had Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installed, below are the results for all the VPS servers.
AMD
Intel
AMD
Intel HP
Intel HF
If we check the test results from the VPS benchmark on all 3 services above we can see that the best is Vultr Intel Hight Frequency, it has the best read/write speeds for a block with 4k size (which is the most relevant) and it has the best CPU score, all at a price of $18. The second best is Hetzner, that has better results then DigitalOcean at a price of only $5.5, image what you can get for a $18 price as the Hetzner one.
Next test for the ones that is using this for WordPress or other web service we will see the results of the WordPress Benchmark plugin on all the services with same WordPress configs and everything, the test will be quite relevant because it will test everything, from CPU to write speed, DB and network.
AMD
Intel
AMD
Intel HP
Intel HF
As you can see in the above picture the best VPS is Vultr Intel HF it is scoring the best it has 9.3 and is doing the best for CPU and DB. Hetzner again comes on second place not far behind Vultr.
Vultr and Hetzner had passing grades and DigitalOcean didn’t pass again at this tests.
Having a fast website is important not only for your visitors and increased conversion rates but also for SEO. In this test I have just run a simple speed test with 2 tools to see how every service is performing. I haven’t configured any caching or anything and just left the default things.
Of course when comes to speeds a server needs also to be good at handling a lot of sessions per minute or seconds but here we will test only the website speed. The other benchmarks would help understanding which is better to handle many requests.
GTMatrix
Page Speed
AMD
Intel
AMD
Intel
Intel HF
The results are very similar from my point of view this is not the most concludent test, but as per results if you want the fastest VPS server in this price point the Vultr Intel HF is the best one out there, it has the lowest page load scores at only 620ms load for a complete website. Second runner as before is the Hetzner one.
Below is a table with all the results so we better see what is happening.
| Service | Read (4K) | Write (4K) | CPU | WordPress Benchmark | PageSpeed Test | GTMatrix | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner AMD | 144 MB/s | 144 MB/s | Single:959 Multi:1863 | 8.9 | 92 | 702ms | $5.5 |
| DO AMD | 90 MB/s | 90 MB/s | Single:659 Multi:1258 | 7.9 | 92 | 1.1s | $21 |
| DO Intel | 238 MB/s | 239 MB/s | Single:1037 Multi:1137 | 8.6 | 92 | 1.1s | $21 |
| Vultr AMD | 207 MB/s | 208 MB/s | Single:792 Multi:1137 | 8.4 | 92 | 703ms | $18 |
| Vultr Intel | 447 MB/s | 448 MB/s | Single:939 Multi:1857 | 9.1 | 91 | 702ms | $18 |
| Vultr Intel HF | 410 MB/s | 411 MB/s | Single:1074 Multi:2165 | 9.3 | 91 | 620ms | $18 |
| Best One | Vultr Intel | Vultr Intel | Vultr Intel HF | Vultr Intel HF | Vultr Intel HF | Vultr Intel HF |
As Hetzner is having very low prices comparing with the rest I thought it would be a good idea to do a test with a bigger VPS. A bigger VPS is offering more in terms of CPU, RAM and disk space at about $16. I have only tested the VPS and WordPress as it would be enough to make an idea.
These tests should be quite relevant if you want to use a VPS for your WordPress websites or other projects, I have tested some of the most known ones on the market and if you want the best one out there then Vultr Intel HF would be the best one.
If you are constrained by budget or you just need more RAM and space at a decent price then Hetzner is the one for you.
I have used all of them in the past (now I am on Hetzner) and I can say that indeed Vultr and Hetzner have the best services out there. DigitalOcean had a drop in quality lately and also I have seen it has picks in performance most likely because of the shared model.
All of the VPS providers have offers that can be used to get free credits so you can test them to see if is the one for you.