OVHcloud vs Hetzner vs DanubeData: Which European Cloud in 2026?

If you're shopping for European cloud hosting in 2026, three names come up in almost every conversation: OVHcloud, Hetzner, and DanubeData. They're all EU-sovereign, they're all GDPR-native, and they all promise to be a credible alternative to AWS, Azure, or GCP.

But the moment you start comparing them seriously, you realise they're solving very different problems. OVHcloud is a publicly traded French hyperscaler chasing regulated enterprise workloads. Hetzner is a 28-year-old German infrastructure company that built its reputation on ruthless price-performance. DanubeData is a newer German managed-platform player that runs on Hetzner dedicated bare-metal and layers Kubernetes, managed databases, and object storage on top.

This guide strips away the marketing and compares them the way a CTO or tech lead actually needs to — feature by feature, price by price, with honest trade-offs and a decision framework at the end. We'll be upfront about something unusual: DanubeData runs on Hetzner hardware. That means we're not trying to beat Hetzner at raw VPS prices (we can't — we're their customer). What we do is package higher-level managed services on top of Hetzner's bare-metal performance, on a single EU-sovereign bill.

Three Philosophies, One Continent

Before we get into prices, it helps to understand what each provider is actually optimising for. They're not three flavours of the same product — they're three different bets on what European cloud should look like.

OVHcloud: The French Hyperscaler

Founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba in Roubaix, France, OVHcloud (formerly just "OVH") is the largest cloud provider headquartered in Europe. It's publicly traded on Euronext Paris, reported roughly €1 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024, and operates more than 30 datacenters across France, Germany, Poland, the UK, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and the United States. It owns its own fibre backbone and builds its own servers in-house.

Philosophically, OVHcloud positions itself as the European answer to AWS. It offers the full hyperscaler menu — Public Cloud (Instances, Managed Kubernetes, Managed Databases, Object Storage), Hosted Private Cloud (VMware, Nutanix), Bare Metal Cloud, and a Web Cloud tier for traditional hosting. It goes deep on certifications (HDS for French healthcare data, SecNumCloud for sensitive state workloads, ISO 27001/27701, SOC 2, PCI DSS). If you're a large enterprise with procurement, audit, or regulatory checklists, OVHcloud is usually the only European name on them.

Hetzner: The German Infrastructure Powerhouse

Hetzner Online GmbH was founded in 1997 in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, and today operates around 25 datacenter parks spread across Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki, and Ashburn (Virginia). It's privately held, famously profitable, and doesn't spend its budget on glossy booths at cloud conferences. It spends it on racks, power, and fibre.

Hetzner is the king of price-performance in Europe. Its cloud VPS and dedicated server prices routinely undercut every other serious provider by a factor of 3-5x — sometimes more, compared to hyperscalers. The product catalogue is deliberately narrow: Cloud VPS (shared and dedicated vCPU), Dedicated Servers (AMD Ryzen, EPYC, Intel), Storage Boxes, Object Storage (since 2024), Load Balancers, and Managed Kubernetes (limited). That's essentially it. There are no managed Postgres, no managed Redis, no serverless, no BigQuery equivalent.

Hetzner's deal is clear: you get world-class hardware at world-class prices, and you manage it yourself.

DanubeData: Managed Services on Bare-Metal

DanubeData is a German managed-platform provider operating out of Falkenstein, and we'll say the quiet part loud: we run on Hetzner dedicated bare-metal servers. That's not a weakness — it's a deliberate architectural choice. Hetzner gives us AMD EPYC Zen 4 CPUs, DDR5 ECC memory, and enterprise NVMe at prices no other European supplier matches. We add the software layer on top.

Specifically, DanubeData runs a production Kubernetes cluster on those dedicated servers and uses KubeVirt to provide VPS instances (with snapshot semantics, IPv4+IPv6, predictable IOPS from local NVMe, and no noisy-neighbour issues because each plan gets its own dedicated LVM slice). On the same platform we ship fully managed Postgres/MySQL/MariaDB, managed Redis/Valkey/Dragonfly, S3-compatible object storage, serverless containers (Knative), a one-click managed-app catalog, and a Nextcloud-based Storage Share product — all billed on one invoice, all in the EU, all operated by our team.

In short: DanubeData is for teams that love Hetzner's price-performance but don't want to run Postgres clusters, Redis failover, S3 gateways, and Kubernetes themselves. We do the ops. You ship the product.

Company Snapshot

When Each Provider Is the Right Answer

Here's the clearest way to think about it: the three providers don't really compete head-to-head. They each own a different part of the European market.

Choose OVHcloud When…

• You need regulated certifications. HDS for French healthcare, SecNumCloud for sensitive public-sector data, or aggressive PCI/ISO audits. No other provider in this comparison has these.
• You need bare metal with deep customisation. OVH's Bare Metal Cloud lets you pick exact CPU, RAM, disk, and network topology, with 24/7 escalation and an SLA sheet.
• You want hosted Private Cloud (VMware / Nutanix). OVH is one of the few European providers still selling enterprise VMware as a managed service.
• You need global presence. Datacenters in North America, Asia-Pacific, and Canada for latency-sensitive, distributed deployments.
• Your procurement team prefers a public company. Publicly traded, audited financials, multi-year enterprise contracts.

Choose Hetzner When…

• You want the cheapest raw compute in Europe. Cloud VPS, dedicated servers, object storage — nobody matches Hetzner on price per vCPU or per TB.
• You're happy operating your own stack. OS updates, database installation, replication, backups, monitoring, patching — all on you.
• You need a dedicated server (AX/EX line) with 64-256 GB RAM and multi-TB NVMe. This is Hetzner's sweet spot.
• You have an SRE or senior devops in-house. Hetzner is a wonderful platform for people who enjoy operating Linux boxes.
• You want Object Storage at €4.99/TB. Released in 2024, it's the cheapest mainstream S3-compatible storage in Europe.

Choose DanubeData When…

• You want managed Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Valkey, or Dragonfly without the pager duty. We handle failover, replication, patching, backups.
• You want VPS, managed databases, S3, and serverless on one EU-sovereign bill. Unified dashboard, unified invoice, one support team.
• You love Hetzner hardware but don't want to operate it. We sit on the same bare-metal, we just do the ops layer for you.
• You want 20 TB of traffic included per VPS. Most European competitors cap at 1-20 TB with aggressive overage. We charge €1.21/TB over the included allowance, which is dramatically cheaper than AWS or OVHcloud.
• You're a small-to-mid SaaS that doesn't want to run its own Postgres. This is our core audience.
• You want a free €50 signup credit to actually try the platform without committing.

VPS-Equivalent Pricing Comparison

Let's get into numbers. These are current 2026 list prices for the smallest shared-vCPU VPS plans from each provider, in their EU datacenter. All include IPv4 and IPv6 and are priced per month. DanubeData pricing excludes VAT; OVHcloud and Hetzner prices are also excluding VAT where possible for consistency.

The raw-price winner is clearly Hetzner, which is exactly what we'd expect — and why we run on their hardware. But look at what you get at each tier:

Included Traffic: The Hidden Cost

Monthly bandwidth is where European providers differ dramatically, and where "cheap" hyperscalers become expensive.

Hetzner and DanubeData are in the same league on traffic. OVHcloud's "unlimited" is usually fine for web workloads but shapes on bandwidth rather than volume, which matters if you're serving video or large files. AWS is listed purely to show how brutally different the hyperscaler economics are.

Managed Database Pricing

This is the table that usually settles the argument for anyone running Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB as part of a SaaS product.

Two things to notice here. First, Hetzner genuinely doesn't offer a managed database product. If you want Postgres on Hetzner, you install it on a cloud VPS or a dedicated server, you configure replication, and you set up backups — yourself. That's absolutely fine if you have the team to do it, but it's the single biggest reason teams outgrow Hetzner as they scale.

Second, DanubeData managed databases are roughly half the price of OVHcloud's managed Public Cloud databases, while running on the same AMD EPYC Zen 4 Hetzner hardware with local NVMe storage. That's not a coincidence — it's the entire reason DanubeData exists as a product.

Object Storage: S3 at European Prices

Object storage is one of those bills that looks small at the start and then surprises you 18 months later. Here's the honest comparison.

If you need 100+ TB of cold storage, Hetzner's new Object Storage at €4.99/TB is the best raw price in Europe. If you're a small-to-mid SaaS pushing under 1-5 TB of media, DanubeData's €3.99/mo bundle includes both the storage and the traffic — no surprise egress bill. If you're already on OVHcloud for compliance reasons, their Object Storage plugs in seamlessly but you pay roughly 2x the Hetzner/DanubeData rate.

Bare Metal / Dedicated Servers

This is OVHcloud and Hetzner's home turf. DanubeData doesn't sell raw dedicated servers — we run on dedicated servers from Hetzner and resell slices of that capacity as managed VPS and managed databases.

If you genuinely need a full bare-metal box with root and custom RAID, Hetzner is the sharpest price. OVHcloud wins on customisation, SLA tiers, and the ability to wire bare metal into their Private Cloud for hybrid workloads. DanubeData intentionally stays out of that market — we're a layer above bare metal, not another reseller of it.

Networking, Regions, and EU Sovereignty

All three providers are EU-sovereign, GDPR-native, and not subject to the US CLOUD Act in the way AWS, Azure, or GCP are. But the details matter.

If you need HDS, SecNumCloud, or multi-continent deployments, OVHcloud is the only name on the list that qualifies. For pure EU workloads, all three pass the Schrems II test comfortably.

Managed Kubernetes, Serverless, and Higher-Level Services

This is increasingly where the three providers separate — especially for modern, container-first teams.

Scenarios: Which Provider Wins?

Let's do three realistic scenarios and see where the numbers land.

Scenario 1: Early-Stage SaaS, ~100 Paying Customers

Needs: 1 web VPS (2 vCPU / 4 GB), 1 managed Postgres (small), 1 Redis cache, 500 GB S3 for user uploads, EU hosting.

Hetzner wins on raw cost — if you or a teammate are willing to spend ~5-10 hours/month installing, patching, and backing up Postgres and Redis. DanubeData wins the moment you value your time at more than €5/hour. OVHcloud is roughly 2x the DanubeData price at this size.

Scenario 2: Mid-Size Production SaaS, High Availability

Needs: 3 web VPS, Postgres with 2 read replicas, Redis master + replica, 2 TB S3, 10 TB monthly traffic.

DanubeData lands at roughly 40% of OVHcloud's cost for the same managed topology, and is a fully managed substitute for roughly 3x what a Hetzner DIY stack costs — where Hetzner's hidden cost is the engineering time to keep that stack healthy.

Scenario 3: Regulated Enterprise (Healthcare or Public Sector)

Needs: HDS or SecNumCloud certification, auditable processes, hosted Private Cloud (VMware) for legacy systems, Tier-III datacenter.

This one isn't close. OVHcloud is effectively the only player with HDS and SecNumCloud certifications. Hetzner and DanubeData can comfortably host GDPR-compliant workloads, but if your compliance team has "HDS" or "SecNumCloud" on a checklist, only OVHcloud ticks the box today.

Decision Framework

If you want a quick mental flowchart, it goes like this:

Can You Combine Them?

Yes, and plenty of teams do. A common and pragmatic pattern is:

• Bare metal or dedicated workloads on Hetzner (cheap CPU/RAM at scale).
• Managed databases, Redis, S3, and serverless on DanubeData (no ops burden, EU-sovereign, in the same Falkenstein region so latency is essentially datacenter-local).
• Regulated or certified workloads on OVHcloud if you have a compliance mandate.

Because DanubeData runs inside Falkenstein on Hetzner dedicated servers, connecting your Hetzner Cloud VPS or dedicated server to a DanubeData managed Postgres is as simple as whitelisting an IP. Sub-millisecond round-trip latency, no cross-datacenter traffic cost, and a single DPA covers the data flow.

Reliability Track Record

• OVHcloud had a major incident in March 2021 when the SBG-2 datacenter in Strasbourg caught fire, destroying one facility and disrupting three others. Customer data loss was real and reputationally painful. Since then, OVHcloud has invested heavily in fire-suppression, multi-zone architectures, and explicit SLAs. Day-to-day, their multi-region Public Cloud is now reliable.
• Hetzner has a famously steady track record across more than 25 years. The biggest historical complaint is that their cloud product had occasional network or storage hiccups in the early years; post-2022 cloud reliability has been strong, and their dedicated server business is effectively a benchmark.
• DanubeData is a newer platform, but built on top of Hetzner's mature dedicated-server infrastructure. Platform-level architectural choices (Kubernetes with Cilium, local-NVMe snapshots via TopoLVM, Velero offsite backups to Hetzner Object Storage, ArgoCD GitOps) give us a clean operational story. We're transparent about incidents on our status page.

Support Quality

• OVHcloud: ticket-based standard support included; paid Business and Enterprise plans unlock 24/7 phone and named account managers. Quality varies by tier — enterprise support is solid, entry-tier is sometimes slow.
• Hetzner: ticket-only support, German engineering pragmatism. Responses are concise and competent but not hand-holding. Great if you know what you're doing.
• DanubeData: direct email and ticket support, with founder-accessible Slack/Discord for higher-tier customers. Because we operate the managed layer ourselves, our support engineers can actually see your Postgres cluster's logs and replication lag — not just tell you to check your instance.

Pricing Transparency

All three providers publish list prices. OVHcloud's pricing is the most complex because of the sheer breadth of products (Public Cloud vs Web Cloud vs Bare Metal vs Hosted Private Cloud, each with their own tiers). Hetzner's is famously simple — everything fits on two pages. DanubeData publishes a full plan ladder (Nano €4.49, Micro €7.49, Small €12.49, Medium €24.99, Large €49.99 for shared CPU; roughly 2x for dedicated CPU) and separate per-product pages for databases, caches, S3, and serverless.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which has the best SLA?

OVHcloud publishes the most detailed SLA matrix, with tiers per product (Public Cloud Instances typically 99.95%, Private Cloud up to 99.99%, Bare Metal varies). Hetzner publishes a 99.9% uptime commitment for Cloud and a more general availability commitment for dedicated servers. DanubeData offers a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA on our managed services with service credits, and we inherit Hetzner's dedicated-server uptime underneath.

Which supports Windows Server?

OVHcloud and Hetzner both offer Windows Server licensing as an add-on on Cloud and Bare Metal products. DanubeData currently focuses on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky, Fedora, Alpine) for VPS images; Windows is possible via custom KubeVirt images but isn't in the standard plan ladder.

What's the reliability track record?

See the section above — OVHcloud had the high-profile 2021 SBG-2 fire but has improved substantially; Hetzner has one of the cleanest multi-decade records in the industry; DanubeData is newer but operates on top of Hetzner's infrastructure with transparent status reporting.

How do they compare on support?

OVHcloud has tiered support up to enterprise-grade. Hetzner offers no-frills ticket support that's fast for infrastructure questions. DanubeData provides managed-layer support that can actually debug your database or cache cluster for you, not just your VM — because we run the software on it.

Are they all equally GDPR-compliant and Schrems II safe?

Yes. All three are EU-incorporated, store and process data in EU datacenters by default, and sign DPAs. None are subject to the US CLOUD Act the way AWS, Azure, or GCP are. For workloads with cross-border transfer restrictions, all three qualify.

How transparent is pricing?

All three publish public pricing. OVHcloud's catalogue is the widest and therefore the most complex; Hetzner is famously simple; DanubeData publishes per-product pages with flat monthly prices. None of them use the AWS trick of hiding egress and inter-AZ traffic fees until your first bill.

Can I combine providers?

Absolutely. A popular pattern is Hetzner dedicated servers for bulk compute + DanubeData managed databases + OVHcloud for any certified workload. Because DanubeData is physically co-located in Falkenstein with Hetzner, the Hetzner→DanubeData combination has essentially zero latency overhead.

Which should a brand-new startup pick in 2026?

If you're shipping a SaaS MVP and don't want to spend weekends installing Postgres, start on DanubeData — the €50 signup credit covers roughly a month of a realistic small stack. If you're a solo developer with strong Linux skills and a tight budget, Hetzner is unbeatable. If you're going straight into a regulated market (healthcare, French public sector), talk to OVHcloud on day one because the certifications take time to navigate.

The Honest Take

There's no universal winner here, and we're not going to pretend there is. Europe in 2026 has three credible sovereign clouds because there are three distinct problems to solve.

Hetzner is the cheapest compute in Europe — probably in the world. If your team has the operational maturity to run its own databases and you just need great Linux boxes cheap, nothing beats them. We run on their hardware for a reason.

OVHcloud is the certifications-and-global-reach play. If you need HDS, SecNumCloud, multi-continent regions, hosted VMware, or you need a publicly traded vendor your CFO's due-diligence team is comfortable with, OVHcloud is genuinely the only serious European answer.

DanubeData is for teams that want managed Postgres, Redis, MySQL, S3, serverless, and VPS on one EU-sovereign bill, without operating any of it themselves. We sit on top of Hetzner's bare-metal, we don't try to out-price them at the raw infrastructure layer, and we charge about half of OVHcloud's managed-database prices because we've optimised the stack from Kubernetes upward.

If you're spending more than a few hours a month keeping Postgres happy, or your Redis replica keeps falling out of sync at 2am, or your S3 bill has a suspicious egress line on it, there's a good chance DanubeData saves you real money and real sleep.

Get Started With DanubeData

If after all of this you think DanubeData might be the right fit for your team, here's how to actually try it:

1. Create an account — we give every new account €50 in signup credit, which is usually enough to run a realistic small stack for a full month.
2. Deploy a VPS from €4.49/mo (DD Nano, 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 TB traffic included).
3. Add a managed Postgres, MySQL, or MariaDB from €19.99/mo, or a managed Redis, Valkey, or Dragonfly cache from €4.99/mo.
4. Attach S3 object storage (€3.99/mo includes 1 TB storage + 1 TB egress) for media and backups.
5. Optionally ship on Knative-based Serverless Containers from €5/mo, with scale-to-zero.

Everything is EU-sovereign, GDPR-native, runs on AMD EPYC Zen 4 with DDR5 ECC and enterprise NVMe, and lives on a single dashboard and a single monthly invoice.

Questions? Our team answers tickets quickly and we're happy to walk through migrations from OVHcloud, Hetzner, AWS, or anywhere else. Get in touch — we're based in Falkenstein, the same datacenter park as Hetzner, and we'd love to help you pick the right European cloud.