At the roughly $5-6.50/month price point, Hetzner's CPX11 is the clear spec winner: $4.56/month for 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe SSD and 20 TB bandwidth. DigitalOcean and Vultr's $6/month plans offer half the RAM and a fraction of the bandwidth. Hostinger's VPS1 costs more than all three while offering the least of any of them.
Key takeaways
- Hetzner's CPX11 wins on every spec at the lowest price — 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, 20 TB bandwidth for $4.56/month.
- DigitalOcean and Vultr are nearly identical at $6/month: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, ~25 GB SSD, ~1 TB bandwidth.
- Hostinger's VPS1 is the most expensive of the four at $6.49/month, with the same 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM as DigitalOcean and Vultr but less storage (20 GB) and dramatically less bandwidth (1 TB vs. Hetzner's 20 TB).
- This isn't the article to link Hostinger's VPS as the pick — on raw specs, it plainly isn't, and pretending otherwise would contradict the renewal-pricing and WordPress comparisons already published on this site.
- Bandwidth is the single biggest gap. 20 TB vs. 1 TB matters the moment you're serving anything with real traffic, not just running a background job.
The comparison
| Provider / plan | Price | vCPU | RAM | Storage | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner CPX11 | $4.56/mo | 2 | 2 GB | 40 GB NVMe | 20 TB |
| DigitalOcean Basic | $6.00/mo | 1 | 1 GB | ~25 GB SSD | ~1 TB |
| Vultr Cloud Compute | $6.00/mo | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB NVMe | 1 TB |
| Hostinger VPS1 | $6.49/mo | 1 | 1 GB | 20 GB | 1 TB |
Bar length = included monthly bandwidth, scaled to Hetzner's 20 TB. Sourced August 2026.
Why Hetzner is this far ahead
Hetzner runs its own European data centers rather than reselling capacity on top of a larger cloud, and that vertical integration is the honest explanation for the price gap — not a catch hiding somewhere in the fine print. The trade-offs developers report are real but narrower than the spec sheet suggests: fewer regions outside Europe, and a support experience some describe as more self-serve than a US-based host's live chat. For a solo developer comfortable managing their own server, neither is disqualifying.
Where Hostinger's VPS actually makes sense
Not here, on price-per-spec. Its case is convenience, not compute: one dashboard for domain, shared hosting and VPS if you're already inside that ecosystem, and a control panel some developers find simpler than Hetzner's more infrastructure-first console. That's a real reason to choose it — it just isn't a cost or specs reason, and this article isn't going to pretend it is one.
Which one to pick
- Best specs at the lowest price, comfortable managing your own box: Hetzner CPX11.
- Want the largest ecosystem and most third-party tutorials at this price: DigitalOcean or Vultr — nearly identical to each other.
- Already have a domain and shared hosting with one provider and want one dashboard: Hostinger's VPS is a legitimate convenience trade, not a specs win.
- Running Django, Next.js SSR, or anything needing real headroom: the extra RAM on Hetzner's CPX11 buys real breathing room the 1 GB plans don't have — see the Django hosting cost breakdown for what that headroom is actually for.