Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime
by yusufusta on 4/18/2026, 1:29:04 PM
https://isayeter.com/posts/digitalocean-to-hetzner-migration/
Comments
by: mariopt
Every time I see this kind of article, no one really bothers about sb/server redundancy, load balancers, etc. are we ok with just 1 big server that may fail and bring several services down?<p>You saved a lot of money but you'll spend a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches.
4/18/2026, 3:45:22 PM
by: antirez
I moved two servers, one from Linode and the other from DO to Hetzner a few months ago, with similar savings. The best part was that the two servers had tens of different sites running, implemented in different languages, with obsolete libraries, MySQL and Redis instances. A total mess. Well: Claude Code migrated it all, sometimes rewriting parts when the libraries where no longer available. Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.
4/18/2026, 1:58:46 PM
by: adamcharnock
This is something we've[0] done a number of times for customers coming from various cloud providers. In our case we move customers onto a multi-server (sometimes multi-AZ) deployment in Hetzner, using Kubernetes to distribute workloads across servers and provide HA. Kubernetes is likely a lot for a single node deployment such as the OP, but it makes a lot more sense as soon as multiple nodes are involved.<p>For backups we use both Velero and application-level backup for critical workloads (i.e. Postgres WAL backups for PITR). We also ensure all state is on at least two nodes for HA.<p>We also find bare metal to be a lot more performant in general. Compared to AWS we typically see service response times halve. It is not that virtualisation inherently has that much overhead, rather it is everything else. Eg, bare metal offers:<p>- Reduced disk latency (NVMe vs network block storage)<p>- Reduced network latency (we run dedicated fibre, so inter-az is about 1/10th the latency)<p>- Less cache contention, etc [1]<p>Anyway, if you want to chat about this sometime just ping me an email: adam@ company domain.<p>[0] <a href="https://lithus.eu" rel="nofollow">https://lithus.eu</a><p>[1] I wrote more on this 6 months ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45615867</a>
4/18/2026, 3:04:25 PM
by: largbae
The migration sharing is admirable and useful teaching, thank you!<p>I see the DigitalOcean vs Hetzner comparison as a tradeoff that we make in different domains all day long, similar to opening your DoorDash or UberEats instead of making your own dinner(and the cost ratio is similar too).<p>I work in all 3 major clouds, on-prem, the works. I still head to the DigitalOcean console for bits and pieces type work or proof of concept testing. Sometimes you just want to click a button and the server or bucket or whatever is ready and here's the access info and it has sane defaults and if I need backups or whatnot it's just a checkbox. Your time is worth money too.
4/18/2026, 2:19:18 PM
by: neeraga
Can someone tell me the AWS server cost with the same spec? Probably $5000 per month?
4/18/2026, 4:12:18 PM
by: Doohickey-d
What are you doing for DB backups? Do you have a replica/standby? Or is it just hourly or something like that?<p>Because with a single-server setup like this, I'd imagine that hardware (e.g. SSD) failure brings down your app, and in the case of SSD failure, you then have hours or days downtime while you set everything up again.
4/18/2026, 2:02:09 PM
by: caymanjim
Congrats on doing this successfully, but your setup is amateur. This would have been infinitely easier if you were using IaC (Terraform/Ansible), containerized applications (that you're not already doing that is madness), and had a high-availability cluster setup in place already. It sounds like avoiding downtime is important to you, yet there's no redundancy in the existing stack at all, and everything is done by hand.<p>This isn't something others should use as an example.
4/18/2026, 4:12:56 PM
by: onetimeusename
AWS only requires a card from me. I tried registering at Hetzner and they wanted a picture of my passport.
4/18/2026, 2:48:28 PM
by: pennomi
I saved about $1200 a year by moving from AWS to Hetzner. Can’t recommend it enough. AWS has kind of become a scam.
4/18/2026, 1:58:59 PM
by: xuki
I've had excellent experiences with Percona xtrabackup for MySQL migration and backups in general. It runs live with almost no performance penalty on the source. It works so well that I always wait for them to release a new matching version before upgrade to a new MySQL version.
4/18/2026, 1:55:39 PM
by: pmdr
I started with DO in 2013 when they offered 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM for $5/mo. For some reason I paid no VAT then, but I do now. Their $4/mo option now is still 512MB, still 1 vCPU, but 10GB SSD. So it's like the last decade of technological progress with regards to RAM, CPU and storage that should either lead to price cuts/spec bumps didn't happen. And yeah, DO got expensive before AI bought up all the memory.
4/18/2026, 3:39:05 PM
by: PunchyHamster
> Old server: CentOS 7 — long past its end-of-life, but still running in production. New server: AlmaLinux 9.7 — a RHEL 9 compatible distribution and the natural successor to CentOS.<p>So they did same mistake all over again. Debian or Ubuntu would just be upgrade-in-place and migrate
4/18/2026, 4:03:59 PM
by: raphinou
Am I missing something? I'm genuinely surprised it was not deployed from the start on a dedicated server. Don't you make a cost analysis before deploy? And if the cost analysis was ok at initial deploy, why wait to have such a difference in cost before migrating? How much money goes wasted in such situations?
4/18/2026, 3:30:23 PM
by: utopiah
Migrated from OVH to Hezner last Winter too, 0 downtime since, rolling backup running fine and lower bill too.
4/18/2026, 3:32:40 PM
by: phamilton
Given the premise that zero day exploits are going to be frequent going forward, I feel like there is a new standard for secure deployment.<p>Namely, all remote access (including serving http) must managed by a major player big enough to be part of private disclosure (e.g. Project Glasswing).<p>That doesn't mean we have to use AWS et al for everything, but some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path. For example, I've started running on Hetzner with Cloudflare Tunnels.<p>Anyone else doing something similar?
4/18/2026, 3:12:08 PM
by: gbro3n
I did the same this year. I really liked Digital Ocean though, compared to more complex cloud offerings like AWS. AWS feels like spending more for the same complexity. At least DO feels like it does save time and mental band width. Still though, the performance of cloud VPS is abysmal for the price. I'm now on Hetzner + K3's plus Flux CD (with Cloudflare for file storage (R2) and caching. I run postgres on the same machine with frequent dump backups. If I ever need realtime read replicas, I'll likely just migrate the DB to Neon or something and keep Hetzner with snapshots for running app containers.
4/18/2026, 2:56:17 PM
by: talkingtab
I also have used DO for years, and was very happy with the quality of their service. Until I found the alternative prices. Not as easy to use, but much better performance for much lower prices.
4/18/2026, 3:39:01 PM
by: apitman
I wish we had something like Hetzner dedicated near us-east-1.<p>They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.
4/18/2026, 2:35:31 PM
by: pellepelster
I had my fair share of Hyperscaler -> $something_else migrations during the past year. I agree, especially with rented hardware the price-difference is kind of ridiculous.<p>The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.<p>For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on <a href="https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html</a> which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.
4/18/2026, 2:26:15 PM
by: nickandbro
Love Hetzner. Cheapest prices in all the land (aside from Hosting your own server) from what I’ve gathered online. Host:<p><a href="https://slitherworld.com" rel="nofollow">https://slitherworld.com</a><p>My foray into multiplayer games.
4/18/2026, 3:21:54 PM
by: rawoke083600
Super happy customer for about 5 years now..<p>And i say it every time they came up: Their cloud UX is brilliant and simple! Compared to the big ones out there.
4/18/2026, 3:34:59 PM
by: nixpulvis
We need more competition across the board. These savings are insane and DO should be sweating, right?
4/18/2026, 1:53:25 PM
by: wouldbecouldbe
yeah we did the same, however we also run an identical backup server in a different data center so we can switch over in matter of minutes if needed.
4/18/2026, 2:29:18 PM
by: shermantanktop
Ah yes, create db replica, promote replica to primary. Seems so simple!<p>When I’ve seen this work well, it’s either built into the product as an established feature, or it’s a devops procedure that has a runbook and is done weekly.<p>Doing it with low level commands and without a lot of experience is pretty likely to have issues. And that’s what happened here.
4/18/2026, 4:01:38 PM
by: ianberdin
When you find a gold, why tell everyone where it is? Silent happiness keeps the benefits:)
4/18/2026, 3:28:33 PM
by: JSR_FDED
> Cloud providers are expensive for steady-state workloads.<p>Asking the obvious question: why not your own server in a colo?
4/18/2026, 2:03:13 PM
by: ianberdin
Hey, congrats! What city do you live in?
4/18/2026, 3:25:16 PM
by: OliverGuy
What's the HA plan?<p>Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?
4/18/2026, 3:04:30 PM
by: sylware
I had to ban the whole DigitalOcean AS.<p>Full of scanners, script kiddies and maybe worse.
4/18/2026, 3:08:25 PM
by: testing22321
I moved my VPS from Rackspace to Hertzner. From $120/mo to $35.<p>Moving away from the US also felt great.
4/18/2026, 1:56:21 PM
by: lloydatkinson
Just watch out Hetzner don’t fail to take a payment from you from their end then proceed to flag your account for non-payment all while communicating absolutely nothing about this to you arriving at the conclusion they will delete all your servers and ban your account and identity from ever using them again.<p>Happened to me.<p>I now advise people to avoid clown-led services like Hetzner and stick to more reputable, if not as cheap, options.
4/18/2026, 3:36:59 PM
by: jonahs197
I use OVH btw.
4/18/2026, 2:11:24 PM
by: ararangua
I got blocked for non reason on DigitalOcean.
4/18/2026, 2:42:37 PM
by: daveguy
And DigitalOcean customer support is non-existent. I had a mail server down and they cut service instead of trying to contact me in any other way. But worse, when they do that, they immediately destroy your data without any possibility to restore. Or at least that's what they told me with their bog standard, garbage support replies. I was a customer for nearly a decade. After it happened, I realized that never would have happened on GCP, AWS, etc. Because they take billing seriously with multiple contact info, a recovery period, etc. All the things a company would be expected to do to maintain good relationships with customers during a billing issue that lasts a few weeks. That was a couple of years ago, so maybe they fixed some stuff. But the complete lack of support and unprofessional B2B practices was an eye opener.<p>DigitalOcean just absolutely is just not an enterprise solution. Don't trust it with your data.<p>Oh, and did I mention I had been paying the upcharge for backups the entire time?
4/18/2026, 3:07:21 PM
by: xhkkffbf
It's tough to work with these publicly traded companies. They need to boost prices to show revenue growth. At some point, they become a bad deal. I've already migrated from DO. Not because of service or quality, but solely because of price.
4/18/2026, 1:53:58 PM
by: aungpaing
100
4/18/2026, 3:04:12 PM
by: OutOfHere
Didn't Hetzner prices increase 30-40% recently? See <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120145</a><p>As such, I doubt the noted price reduction is reproducible. Combine this with Hetzner's sudden deletions of user accounts and services without warning, and it's a bad proposition. Search r/hetzner and r/vps for hetzner for these words: banned, deleted, terminated; there are many reports. What should stun you even more about it is that Hetzner could ostensibly be closely spying on user data and workloads, even offline workloads, without which they won't even know who to ban.<p>The only thing that Hetzner might potentially be good for is to add to an expendable distributed compute pool, one that you can afford to lose, but then you might as well also use other bottom-of-the-barrel untrustworthy providers for it too, e.g. OVH.
4/18/2026, 2:37:42 PM
by: desireco42
I think Digital Ocean is not something where I would worry about costs. I would prefer server like Hetzner but I don't think DO is service where the costs are such that we need to do movement.<p>Plus, this is not what DHH was doing, he was not saving few bucks, but unlocking potential for his company to thrive.
4/18/2026, 3:56:59 PM
by: api
Now consider that DO is reasonably priced compared to the big three cloud providers.<p>Cloud is ludicrously marked up.
4/18/2026, 2:56:03 PM
by: sayYayToLife
[dead]
4/18/2026, 2:25:51 PM
by: orsorna
I always appreciate savings posts, but is $14k USD annual really make or break for a Turkish business? I would not know.
4/18/2026, 1:54:17 PM