Lightsail vs Hetzner vs DigitalOcean

I’m someone who likes simple to use systems so that I can focus most of my time on design, programming and teaching. So when launching version 2 of hackthedegree I wanted a cloud service provider that captured that. Version 1 of hackthedegree was hosted on PythonAnywhere which makes deploying a Python web app very easy and takes care of all the heavy lifting. But for version 2 of hackthedegree I wanted more juice and permissions than PythonAnywhere provided.

Fora Soft Conclusion

If you’re a regulated enterprise needing HIPAA, FedRAMP, 30+ regions, and 200+ managed services on tap — AWS. If you’re a developer-first startup that wants flat per-month pricing, Heroku-style App Platform, and decent managed databases — DigitalOcean. If you’re a price-sensitive team running heavy CPU, GPU, or video-egress workloads in Europe — Hetzner.

My Conclusion

Lightsail is best for projects that know that they will eventually need to scale out into full AWS enterprise infrastructure.

Hetzner is the cheapest option. You get the most juice for your buck but it does have a limited product range.

DigitalOcean offers managed services so you can focus more on writing code than DevOps tasks.

For hackthedegree v2

Though AWS is amazing, it’s way more expensive than the other options. Plus I’m worried about getting locked into something - I want to use a service that makes it easy to migrate.

I am going to use a hybrid approach where I use Hetzner to maximise on compute and DigitalOcean for managed services (e.g. database).

References

• AWS vs DigitalOcean vs Hetzner in 2026: Pricing, Performance & When to Pick Which
• DigitalOcean vs. Hetzner Cloud: a side-by-side comparison for 2026
• AWS Lightsail Alternative 2026: Pricing & Performance