Opinion

Europe is cheaper. Latency is not free.

If your users are in the EU, Hetzner (and often Contabo/OVHcloud) will beat DigitalOcean and Linode on list price for the same RAM. That is not controversial — it shows up in every snapshot we store.

Our position: pick the region of your users first, then optimize price. A “cheap” Falkenstein box is the wrong default for a US-East audience. For US workloads that still care about burn, Vultr and Linode usually undercut DigitalOcean at the same RAM — DigitalOcean remains our pick when the team is new to VPS ops.

Run the VPS Finder with the EU or US lane filter. Confirm nothing silently moved on the price tracker. Related: Best VPS in Europe · Contabo vs Hetzner.