X-ZoneServers
Alternatives guide

DigitalOcean alternatives: six options, and what each is actually best at

Most people looking past DigitalOcean are looking at one of two lines on the invoice: the transfer overage at $0.01 per GiB above the pooled allowance, or the price of the Droplet itself against European hosts that give more hardware for the money. A smaller group needs a region DigitalOcean's twelve cities do not cover. Six alternatives below, with figures read from their own pages on 28 August 2026.
Published by X-ZoneServers · competitor data read from public pages · verify prices at the source before you buy
TL;DR
If bandwidth is what hurts, X-ZoneServers removes the meter entirely and Scaleway includes egress in list prices. If you want the same shape of cloud with more regions, Vultr has 36 and Akamai Cloud has 33 with a $0.005 per GB overage. If you want more hardware per euro, Hetzner or netcup.
01How it works

How this list was put together

Each provider here is one our own customers actually weigh against DigitalOcean, and each entry states what that provider is genuinely best at rather than why it is worse. Figures come from the provider's own public pages on the dates listed under Sources. Where we publish a full head-to-head comparison for a provider, the link sits under its entry.
02Alternatives

Six alternatives to DigitalOcean

  1. 1

    X-ZoneServers

    Best at: Unmetered traffic and guaranteed 1–200 Gbps ports across 12 EU and US metros
    If the transfer overage is why you are here, this removes the meter entirely: every plan is unmetered with no traffic counter — a shared 1 Gbps port on a KVM VPS from €4.00/month, a shared 10 Gbps port from €9.99/month, dedicated servers by guaranteed port from 1 to 200 Gbps — billed hourly or monthly in EUR. Twelve metros in eleven countries, including the Southern and Eastern European cities DigitalOcean does not reach, with Layer 3/4/7 DDoS mitigation included. We publish this page, so weigh it accordingly.
    This is us. We publish this page, so read our entry with that in mind — the disclosure below explains the method.
  2. 2

    Vultr

    Best at: 36 regions — the widest reach of any host on this list
    The closest like-for-like cloud to DigitalOcean with three times the regions: Vultr publishes 36 cloud datacenter regions across six continents, with bare metal, GPU, Kubernetes and object storage in the same account, from $2.50/month. The bandwidth model is the same shape — an allowance per instance with overage at $0.01 per GB in North America and Europe — so it fixes reach, not the meter.
    Read the full comparison
  3. 3

    Akamai Cloud (Linode)

    Best at: Pooled transfer with the lowest overage rate of the mainstream clouds
    The same developer-cloud shape as DigitalOcean with a cheaper meter: Linode has run since 2003 and now trades as Akamai Cloud, with 33 regions and transfer pooled across the account. Overage is $0.005 per GB in core datacenters — half DigitalOcean's rate — and inbound transfer is free.
    Read the full comparison
  4. 4

    Hetzner

    Best at: The lowest price per CPU core in Germany and Finland
    The step change in hardware per euro: Hetzner has run production hosting since 1997 from its own datacenter parks in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, and its AX dedicated line is the European reference point for cost per core. Cloud servers come with a monthly traffic allowance far larger than a Droplet's and a low per-terabyte charge above it; the API, CLI and Terraform ecosystem are mature enough to feel familiar.
    Read the full comparison
  5. 5

    Scaleway

    Best at: A broad French cloud with no egress fees
    A managed-services cloud that does not bill egress: Scaleway states that list prices include egress, so there are no outbound data-transfer fees, and the catalogue runs from €0.43/month instances up to GPU, serverless, Kubernetes and Apple silicon. Instance bandwidth is capped per type from 100 Mbps upward, across three regions: Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
    Read the full comparison
  6. 6

    netcup

    Best at: DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe at value prices, from Germany
    For the smallest Droplets, netcup gives better hardware at a similar price: VPS 500 at €5.91/month including German VAT with 2 vCores, 4 GB of DDR5 ECC and 128 GB of NVMe. Five locations — Vienna, Nuremberg, Amsterdam, Manassas and Singapore — and hourly billing alongside 12-month contract pricing, though without DigitalOcean's managed-database catalogue.
    Read the full comparison
03Comparison

Why people look for a DigitalOcean alternative

  • 1Transfer overage: outbound traffic above the pooled allowance bills at $0.01 per GiB, which turns a busy media or download workload into the largest line on the invoice.
  • 2Hardware per dollar: European hosts routinely offer twice the RAM, or an unmetered gigabit port, at the price of a basic Droplet.
  • 3Regions: twelve cities, with Frankfurt and Amsterdam as the only EU points — nothing in Southern or Eastern Europe.
  • 4USD billing and US-centred support hours are a mismatch for EU companies that invoice in euros and need someone awake in their morning.

What DigitalOcean still does better than most

  • Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL and Valkey, Kubernetes, App Platform and Spaces behind one API and one invoice — the platform is the product, not the Droplet.
  • Documentation and tutorials that many teams learn from even when they host elsewhere.
  • Simple, predictable pricing pages and a control panel that new developers pick up in an afternoon.
04Guide

Before you move off DigitalOcean: a checklist

Five things that decide whether the switch goes smoothly. Most of them are about the invoice and the features you forgot you were using.
  1. Pull the bandwidth report from the DigitalOcean billing page: the 'additional transfer' line for the last three months is the number the unmetered alternatives are competing against.
  2. Inventory managed services — databases, Spaces, Load Balancers, App Platform, Kubernetes — because the compute is the easy part; each managed service needs its own migration path (pg_dump, rclone for Spaces, Helm charts for DOKS).
  3. Droplet snapshots stay on DigitalOcean; rebuild from your Terraform, cloud-init or Ansible definitions and copy application data over rsync or a database dump.
  4. Reserved IPs and DigitalOcean DNS records need equivalents on the target; lower TTLs a day ahead and move DNS last.
  5. DigitalOcean and the hourly-billed alternatives both charge by the hour, so run the old and new stacks side by side through one full traffic cycle and destroy the Droplets only when the new logs look right.

When to stay with DigitalOcean

Switching has a cost. These are the cases where DigitalOcean is still the right answer and this page should not change your mind.
  • You use managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, Kubernetes, App Platform or Spaces — replacing those is a much bigger job than moving a Droplet.
  • Your outbound traffic sits inside the pooled allowance, so the $0.01 per GiB rate never actually bills.
  • Your team learns from their documentation and tutorials, and that is worth real money in engineering time.
05Questions

Frequently asked questions

What is the best DigitalOcean alternative?

For bandwidth-heavy workloads, X-ZoneServers — every plan is unmetered with no transfer counter, and dedicated servers carry guaranteed 1–200 Gbps ports. For a similar managed cloud with more regions, Vultr (36 regions) or Akamai Cloud (33 regions, $0.005 per GB overage). For more hardware per euro in Europe, Hetzner or netcup.

Which alternative does not charge for bandwidth?

X-ZoneServers has no transfer allowance and no overage on any plan. Scaleway states that list prices include egress, so outbound transfer is not billed separately, though instance bandwidth is capped per type from 100 Mbps upward. Vultr and Akamai Cloud still meter, at $0.01 and $0.005 per GB respectively.

Is DigitalOcean expensive?

For compute alone, European hosts generally give more hardware per euro — Hetzner, netcup and Contabo all do. Where DigitalOcean earns its price is the managed platform around the Droplet. The place it can become genuinely expensive is egress: above the pooled allowance, outbound bills at $0.01 per GiB, so 45,000 GiB of overage is about $450 in a month.

Which alternative has the most regions?

Vultr, with 36 cloud datacenter regions across six continents, followed by Akamai Cloud with 33. DigitalOcean lists 12 cities. X-ZoneServers lists 12 metros but concentrates eleven of them in Europe, which makes it deeper inside the EU rather than wider globally.
06Related

Sources and check dates

Every statement about another provider on this page traces to one of these public pages. Where a provider does not publish a figure, this page says so instead of estimating.
  1. DigitalOcean Droplet pricing and bandwidth
    https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets· checked 2026-08-28
  2. DigitalOcean bandwidth billing documentation
    https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/· checked 2026-08-28
  3. Vultr public plans API
    https://api.vultr.com/v2/plans· checked 2026-08-28
  4. Akamai Cloud network transfer costs
    https://techdocs.akamai.com/cloud-computing/docs/network-transfer-usage-and-costs· checked 2026-08-28
  5. Scaleway virtual instance pricing
    https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/virtual-instances/· checked 2026-08-28
  6. netcup VPS — plans and prices
    https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps· checked 2026-08-28
07Legal

Disclosure, method and limits

We are one of the providers compared

This page is published by X-ZoneServers (X ZONE IT SRL, Bucharest, Romania). We sell one of the two services compared, so this is a vendor comparison rather than an independent review. Our method is to quote each provider's own published figures, name the date we read them, and state plainly where the other provider is the better choice.

How the numbers are gathered

Competitor data is read directly from that provider's public website — pricing pages, specification sheets, network and location pages — on the dates listed under Sources, plus public network registries such as PeeringDB and bgp.he.net for ASN details. We do not benchmark competitor hardware ourselves and we do not republish figures from review sites or affiliate directories.

How to read the prices

List prices only. Promotional offers, first-term discounts, renewal rates, setup fees, add-ons, region surcharges and currency all differ per provider and can change without notice. X-ZoneServers prices are in EUR excluding VAT. Where another provider publishes in a different currency or inclusive of VAT, that is marked in the table — those figures are not directly comparable to ours without adjustment.

Accuracy and corrections

The goal is that every claim here can be verified at the source in under a minute. Nothing on this page is a benchmark result, a prediction, or a statement about a competitor's internal operations. If a figure has drifted or is wrong — including where the error favours us — write to us and we will correct it and move the review date.

Trademarks and affiliation

All company and product names are the property of their respective owners and are used here for identification and comparison only. X-ZoneServers is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or a reseller of any other provider named on this page.
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