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DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner: Which is The Best VPS

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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.

DigitalOcean Vs Vultr Vs Hetzner

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:

  • yabs.sh – this is a VPS benchmark tool that will show the VPS details at start and then will run benchmark for read/write speeds, network speeds and CPU.
  • WordPress Benchmark – I have installed CloudPanel with MariaDB 10.9 on all the servers and installed WordPress with a starter template in Kadence. The configs are the default ones and PHP used in 8.0 and all servers come with same configs.
  • Web.dev and GTMatrix speed tests – I am using CloudFlare as DNS provider with no caching plugin or CDN activated, this is just to see how each server is doing out of the box with exactly same configs.

The created VPS servers used for test were as below with the pricing for it, the datacenters were in the East cost for all.

  • Hetzner – CPX11 – AMD CPU 2, 2 GB RAM and 40 GB disk space. Price: $5.5
  • DigitalOcean – Basic Premium Intel and Premium AMD with NVMe, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM and 60 GB disk space, Price: $21
  • Vultr – Cloud Compute AMD and Intel High Performance and Intel High Frequency, 2 CPU, 2GB RAM and 60 GB disk space, Price: $18

All the server except Hetzner which has only 1 option has tested the premium ones. Now let’s see how all are.

VPS Benchmarks

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.

Hetzner

DigitalOcean

AMD

Intel

Vultr

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.

WordPress Benchmark

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.

Hetzner

DigitalOcean

AMD

Intel

Vultr

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.

WordPress Speed 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.

Hetzner

GTMatrix

Page Speed

DigitalOcean

AMD

Intel

Vultr

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.

ServiceRead (4K)Write (4K)CPUWordPress BenchmarkPageSpeed TestGTMatrixPrice
Hetzner AMD144 MB/s144 MB/sSingle:959
Multi:1863
8.992702ms$5.5
DO AMD90 MB/s90 MB/sSingle:659
Multi:1258
7.9921.1s$21
DO Intel238 MB/s239 MB/sSingle:1037
Multi:1137
8.6921.1s$21
Vultr AMD207 MB/s208 MB/sSingle:792
Multi:1137
8.492703ms$18
Vultr Intel447 MB/s448 MB/sSingle:939
Multi:1857
9.191702ms$18
Vultr Intel HF410 MB/s411 MB/sSingle:1074
Multi:2165
9.391620ms$18
Best OneVultr IntelVultr IntelVultr Intel HFVultr Intel HFVultr Intel HFVultr Intel HF

Hetzner AMD 4CPU 8gb RAM Test

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.

Conclusions

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.

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