Best European Alternatives to DigitalOcean

Why people leave DigitalOcean

Nobody chose DigitalOcean by accident. It exists because the hyperscalers made a simple server complicated, and it sells the opposite: a fixed monthly figure, a console with about twelve things in it, and documentation good enough that people who host elsewhere still read it. Most of the complaints on this page are complaints about a product that is doing what it promised.

The reason to look elsewhere is that the promise is no longer distinctive in Europe, and the price stopped being competitive there.

The smallest Droplet is $4.00 a month for 512 MiB of RAM, one vCPU and 10 GiB of disk. Two gigabytes of RAM with two vCPUs is $18.00, with 60 GiB of disk and three terabytes of transfer. A German provider will sell you four gigabytes and forty of disk for roughly €4.51, with twenty terabytes of traffic included.

The second reason is the map. DigitalOcean lists sixteen data centres; nine of them are in the United States and three are in Europe, one of which is London and therefore outside the Union. If your users are European and your auditor asks where the workload runs, you are choosing between Amsterdam and Frankfurt, and that is the whole of the choice.

• Cheap against Amazon is not cheap against Europe DigitalOcean was priced to undercut a hyperscaler and it still does. Held against European providers the same numbers read differently: $18.00 a month buys two gigabytes of memory here, and about €4.51 buys four elsewhere with forty gigabytes of disk attached. That is not a discount to negotiate, it is a different price level, and for a fleet of a dozen machines it is the difference between a line item and a rounding error.
• Two EU locations, and nine American ones Amsterdam and Frankfurt are the European Union, London is not since Brexit, and everything else on the list is outside Europe entirely. There is no Nordic location, nothing in southern Europe, nothing east of Germany. If latency to Warsaw, Madrid or Helsinki matters to your users, DigitalOcean cannot serve it from inside Europe and several providers on this page can.
• The best thing about it is free to everyone DigitalOcean's tutorials are the industry's reference documentation for setting up Linux, Nginx, Postgres and the rest, and they are published openly. That is genuine value and it is also not a reason to stay: the commands work identically on a German server. Teams that think they are paying for the documentation are paying for hosting and reading the documentation for nothing, which they can continue to do afterwards.
• A New York company, and nothing to configure about that DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is established in New York, so the CLOUD Act reaches it in the ordinary way. What is notable is the absence of the machinery the hyperscalers have built around this: no sovereign cloud, no European parent company, no data boundary documentation, no support-personnel controls. What it offers instead is the ordinary set — a data processing agreement, the standard contractual clauses and an EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification. For most customers that is enough. For one writing a data protection impact assessment against a sovereignty requirement, there is no additional control to point at.

What you have to replace, not just match

A DigitalOcean estate is usually small enough to inventory in an afternoon, which makes this the most tractable migration on this part of the site.

Write down four things: the Droplets and their sizes, the managed databases, whatever sits in Spaces, and the App Platform or Kubernetes deployments. The first two move almost mechanically. Spaces has an S3-compatible API, so it moves by changing an endpoint. App Platform is the one with no direct equivalent, because it is a platform rather than infrastructure.

Then decide whether you want the same thing cheaper or something better. Hetzner is the same thing cheaper. UpCloud is the same thing faster with a European footprint DigitalOcean does not have. Scaleway is a larger catalogue that will let the estate grow without another migration in two years.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to DigitalOcean

What actually breaks when you switch

Floating IPs and firewalls are the parts people forget. A DigitalOcean setup usually has a reserved IP pointed at a Droplet, a cloud firewall with rules accumulated over years, and DNS records managed in the same console. None of that exports. Write down the firewall rules before you cancel, because reconstructing them from memory produces either an outage or an open port, and it is not always obvious which.

Managed databases need a maintenance window rather than a copy. A dump and restore moves the data, but connection strings, trusted sources, connection pools and the certificate your application pins all change at the same moment. Do that move on its own evening, with the application stopped, rather than folding it into the same night as everything else.

And keep the old account open for a month. Snapshots, backups and the odd Droplet that turns out to be running something essential surface after the cutover, not before. A month of a $4.00 Droplet is cheaper than discovering in three weeks that the thing nobody could identify was the staging database.

Is DigitalOcean actually expensive?

It is inexpensive compared with the cloud it was built to escape and expensive compared with the European market it now competes in. Both statements are true and people argue past each other because they are comparing against different baselines.

The clearest way to settle it internally is to price memory. Take what you run today, add up the gigabytes of RAM, and price the same total at a German or Finnish provider. For most small fleets the answer lands between a half and a third of the current bill, and the gap widens as the machines get bigger.

Then decide whether that saving is worth a week of work. For one Droplet running a side project, no. For fifteen machines, it pays for the migration inside a quarter and keeps paying.

What happens to my bandwidth allowance when I move?

It changes shape, and usually in your favour. DigitalOcean pools the allowance across all Droplets at team level, starting from 500 GiB on the smallest plan, and bills $0.01 per GiB beyond it. Inbound is free and traffic between Droplets over the VPC does not count.

Hetzner bundles traffic per server instead of pooling it, at twenty terabytes for most plans, which for the overwhelming majority of workloads means you stop thinking about transfer entirely. UpCloud and Scaleway each have their own arrangement, so check yours rather than assuming.

The one thing to verify before moving is whether your allowance is doing quiet work — serving media, for instance. A pooled allowance hides which machine consumes it, and teams occasionally discover the answer only after the pooling is gone.

Is App Platform replaceable?

Not with a like-for-like product on this page, and that is the honest answer. App Platform takes a repository and runs it without you touching a server, which is a platform promise rather than an infrastructure one.

Scaleway comes closest with Serverless Containers, which will run the same container from the same registry with a different deployment step. Hetzner and UpCloud both expect you to run the container yourself, on a server you manage, with a pipeline you write.

If App Platform is doing real work in your setup, sequence the migration so that piece moves last and gets its own week. Teams that treat it as another Droplet discover in week two that it was the only thing without a runbook.

Does moving to Europe change anything legally for a small company?

Less than the marketing on either side suggests, and more than nothing. If you process personal data of EU residents, DigitalOcean can be used compliantly with the usual agreements in place, exactly as any American provider can.

What changes is what you are able to write down. With a German or Finnish provider, the answer to where data is processed and who can compel disclosure is one sentence with no transfer mechanism attached to it. With DigitalOcean the answer needs a paragraph, and since there is no sovereign cloud or data boundary documentation to point at, you are writing that paragraph yourself.

For a startup with no regulated customers this is paperwork. For anyone selling to a hospital, a school or a public body, it is the difference between being on the shortlist and not.

Which one to pick

If you are moving because of the bill, Hetzner is the answer and the arithmetic is not close: twice the memory for roughly a quarter of the money, with twenty terabytes of traffic per server instead of a pooled allowance. For a fleet of any size the migration pays for itself within a quarter.

If you like DigitalOcean and simply want it to be European and faster, UpCloud is the like-for-like move. It costs more than Hetzner, gives you six European countries instead of two, and puts a number on its uptime promise.

If the estate keeps growing and you can feel the next migration coming, go to Scaleway now. The console is less pleasant and the catalogue is deep enough that the next thing you need will be a service rather than another supplier.

And if your reason for staying is the documentation, notice that it is free. DigitalOcean's tutorials remain the best in the industry and remain readable by everyone, including people whose servers are in Gunzenhausen.