Why we moved off DigitalOcean Droplets after 6 years

We’ve been DO customers since 2020. Five separate Droplets across two accounts, a managed Postgres, a Spaces bucket. As of last week, none of it.

What changed

The trigger was the August pricing memo — small line items, all increased, no real justification. The bigger pattern: DO’s product surface has stopped evolving for our needs. Their managed Postgres is still on a version we’d consider out of date. Their object storage has fewer regions than it did in 2022.

Hetzner Cloud was already cheaper. With the bandwidth allowances they actually publish, our all-in monthly bill is now 38% of what it was on DO. The migration took two evenings.

What we’ll miss

Honestly, the docs. DO’s “How to set up X on Ubuntu Y” series is the most-read SRE content on the internet for a reason.