DigitalOcean Load Balancer vs Hetzner Load Balancer
A detailed comparison to help you choose between DigitalOcean Load Balancer and Hetzner Load Balancer.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
DigitalOcean Load Balancer
0 reviews
3.9/5
Hetzner Load Balancer
0 reviews
Hetzner Load Balancer is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.7). DigitalOcean's managed Load Balancer distributes traffic across Droplets automatically. Health checks, SSL termination, sticky sessions, and no configuration of Nginx required. From $12/month. Hetzner's managed load balancer distributes TCP and HTTP(S) traffic across Hetzner Cloud and dedicated root server targets, with configurable health checks, SSL termination and sticky sessions. From €7.49/month, hourly billed.
DigitalOcean Load Balancer Managed load balancer from $12/month | Hetzner Load Balancer Managed load balancing with Layer 4/7 support and auto-scaling integration | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | From $12/mo | From $7.49/mo✓ |
| Best for | DigitalOcean customers who want managed HTTP/TCP load balancing with automatic certificates and health checks without operating Nginx or HAProxy, and multi-continent apps that can use the $15/month Global Load Balancer. | Teams already running Hetzner Cloud or Hetzner dedicated servers who need a cheap, managed, well-documented entry point with TLS termination and health checks. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | — |
| RAM | — | — |
| Storage | — | — |
| Bandwidth | 1 TB/mo | 20 TB/mo✓ |
| SLA uptime | 99.9% | — |
| Data-center count | — | 6 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | Falkenstein (DE)Nuremberg (DE)Helsinki (FI)Ashburn, VA (US)Hillsboro, OR (US)Singapore (SG) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | managed optionhourly billingeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter | managed optioneu datacenterus datacenter |
| Visit DigitalOcean Load Balancer → | Visit Hetzner Load Balancer → | |
DigitalOcean Load Balancer
Pros
- + Fully managed: health checks with auto-eviction, tag-based backends, automatic Let's Encrypt renewal
- + Transparent per-node pricing ($12 HTTP / $15 network) with hourly proration and once-per-minute resizing
- + Modern protocol support: HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSocket with 1-hour timeout, PROXY protocol, dual-stack IPv6
- + Global Load Balancer at $15/month with cross-region failover and CDN caching is strong value
- + No SLA on a single-node balancer is stated openly in the SLA structure, and size-2+ gets 99.9% with tiered credits
- + Tight DOKS integration — Kubernetes LoadBalancer services provision automatically
Cons
- - A single $12/month node has no SLA coverage at all; the 99.9% commitment starts at size 2
- - 99.9% regional SLA is weaker than AWS/Google multi-zone balancer commitments (99.99%)
- - Backends limited to DigitalOcean Droplets/DOKS — no external origins, no multi-cloud
- - No WAF, no balancer-specific DDoS mitigation, no weighted or rule-based traffic steering
- - Five-consecutive-minute unavailability floor deletes short blips from SLA math
- - Egress through the balancer draws down the account transfer allowance and is billed to the LB line item
Hetzner Load Balancer
Pros
- + Cheap for a managed load balancer: LB11 at €7.49/month with 20 TB EU included traffic and a Primary IPv4 included
- + Targets both Hetzner Cloud servers and dedicated root servers over public or private IPv4
- + Solid HTTP feature set: TLS termination with managed certificates, sticky sessions, HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect, proxy protocol
- + Per-service health checks (HTTP/HTTPS/TCP) with configurable interval, timeout, retries and expected responses
- + Hourly billing with monthly cap, six locations across four network zones, first-class API/Terraform/Kubernetes integration
Cons
- - Only Round Robin and Least Connections — no IP-hash, weighting, or L7 path-based routing rules
- - No request logging at all; no WAF or bot management; no built-in autoscaling
- - HTTPS services forward plain HTTP to targets; end-to-end TLS requires a TCP service and loses HTTP features
- - Hetzner targets only (no multi-cloud or on-prem backends); load balancers are bound to a single location
- - No product-level SLA or credits and no published throughput figures per plan
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