VPSBenchmarks — DigitalOcean vs Hetzner (independent benchmark)
The wiki’s first independent, third-party benchmark — the long-standing gap flagged in
synthesis (“all current data is vendor-stated”). VPSBenchmarks runs a neutral, reproducible
test suite against many providers and grades each on a percentile curve, so hetzner-cloud and
digitalocean are scored against the whole field, not each other’s marketing. URL-only ingest
(no copy in raw/).
Methodology (neutral, reproducible)
Seven test families — web, sysbench, endurance, geekbench, fio, iperf3, network transfers — roll up into five graded categories, each scored A–F by percentile against all tested providers:
- Web Performance — response times, p99 latency, request throughput
- CPU Power — Sysbench/Geekbench ops/s + endurance iterations
- Performance Stability — response-time variance/consistency
- Disk I/O — random/sequential via Sysbench + Fio
- Network — Speedtest + Iperf3 up/down
This is exactly the independent reliability / price-performance lens the wiki lacked.
Result — Hetzner wins decisively (CCX13 vs a $12 DO droplet)
| Metric | DigitalOcean (2 GB / 1 core / $12) | Hetzner CCX13 (8 GB / 2 core / €16.49) |
|---|---|---|
| Web Performance | F (2.5/20) | E (5.7/20) |
| Raw CPU Power | F (1.0/20) | E (5.3/20) |
| Disk I/O | D (8.2/20) | D (9.0/20) |
| Network | D (9.4/20) | C (13.3/20) |
| Provisioning | 45 s | 25 s |
Price-performance verdict: Hetzner delivers ~4× RAM and 2× cores for ~37% more monthly cost — substantially better value; its clearest edge is network throughput (C vs D). Note both compared instances grade low-to-mid on the absolute percentile curve, a useful reality check on the small-VPS tier generally.
Why it matters here
This validates, from neutral data, the vendor-stated story the wiki built on official pricing pages: Hetzner’s “cheap and simple / best price-per-resource” pitch (hetzner-cloud) holds up against an independent yardstick, and DigitalOcean’s known weakness on raw synthetic CPU/RAM (digitalocean) is confirmed — DO’s value is its broader developer platform (App Platform, managed DBs), not raw box specs. No contradiction with existing pages; it corroborates them with a non-vendor source.
Caveat
A single instance-pair snapshot on a moving percentile curve; grades shift as the provider field and hardware change (e.g. Hetzner’s April 2026 price rise). Methodology is transparent but results are point-in-time.
Related
hetzner-cloud · digitalocean · synthesis