Hetzner vs OVHcloud: two European operators, two different bets

Hetzner and OVHcloud are the two European operators large enough to own their infrastructure and small enough to price like it. They arrive at similar value from opposite directions: Hetzner by keeping the catalogue tiny, OVHcloud by selling almost everything.

Product philosophy

Hetzner sells cloud servers, dedicated servers, volumes, load balancers, firewalls, private networks and object storage. That is close to the full list. The console and API are correspondingly simple, and you can learn the whole platform in an afternoon.

OVHcloud sells four distinct product lines under one account: an OpenStack based Public Cloud, fixed plan VPS, bare metal across several ranges, and hosted private cloud on VMware. There is also web hosting, domains, storage products and managed Kubernetes. Considerably more surface area, and considerably more to understand.

Neither approach is wrong. Hetzner suits people who know what they want; OVHcloud suits organisations with several different needs under one contract.

Bandwidth and protection

Both are dramatically cheaper than hyperscaler egress, and they get there differently.

Hetzner includes a large monthly allowance per server, historically twenty terabytes in European locations, with inexpensive overage per terabyte.

OVHcloud includes generous or unmetered public traffic on most European products, priced by port speed rather than by volume. For sustained high throughput, check the guaranteed bandwidth on the specific plan rather than the headline word.

OVHcloud adds anti DDoS mitigation across its infrastructure at no additional charge. This is genuinely unusual and it is why the provider is common in game hosting, streaming and anything that attracts hostile attention. Hetzner has protection in place, but OVHcloud makes it a headline capability with a larger scrubbing capacity behind it.

Locations

Hetzner’s footprint is Germany and Finland at its core, with newer North American and Asian sites. OVHcloud has a wider spread: France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Asia and Australia.

For pure European workloads, both are fine and Hetzner’s latency within central Europe is excellent. For anything needing several jurisdictions under one provider, OVHcloud has the reach.

Usability

This is where Hetzner wins clearly. The cloud console is clean, the API is small and predictable, and the Terraform provider is straightforward. Provisioning is fast and the mental model is simple.

OVHcloud’s control panel spans several product generations and reflects it. The OpenStack API underneath Public Cloud is powerful and familiar to anyone who has used OpenStack, and unfamiliar to everyone else. Expect a longer first week.

Bare metal

Both sell physical servers and both are excellent value. OVHcloud has the broader range, from budget lines through to high grade machines with enterprise components and better network guarantees. Hetzner’s server auction, where older hardware is sold off at low prices, has no real equivalent and is worth knowing about if you can accept fixed specifications.

Choosing

Choose Hetzner for the lowest price on straightforward cloud servers, for a clean API and console, for Arm based value, or when your entire requirement is compute plus storage in Europe.

Choose OVHcloud when you need DDoS mitigation included, when you want bare metal and virtual machines under one account, when you need locations outside central Europe, or when an OpenStack API is an advantage rather than an obstacle.

The individual guides are Hetzner Cloud and OVHcloud explained. If you are weighing either against the US developer clouds, see Hetzner vs DigitalOcean.