Choosing between Hetzner and OVH for a 4-core 16GB VPS, what's the real difference?

Question

I'm planning to migrate a small web app that's outgrown its current shared hosting. I've narrowed it down to a VPS with specs around 4 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM, and both Hetzner and OVH have competitive offers in that range. I've read the official specs pages, but I'm looking for real-world experience. For those who have used both, what are the actual differences in things like network reliability, support response times, or hardware consistency? I'm not running anything exotic, just a standard LEMP stack. I've done a basic ping test to their locations, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

admin · Accepted Answer

Choose Hetzner for superior price-to-performance and consistent hardware, or OVH for superior DDoS protection and network resilience. The core difference is their business philosophy: Hetzner excels at providing raw, reliable hardware at the lowest cost, while OVH invests heavily in building a robust, secure, and massive global network infrastructure. In practice, Hetzner's hardware (often AMD EPYC) frequently benchmarks faster for the same core count, but OVH's network is more resilient to large-scale attacks and outages. For a standard LEMP stack, Hetzner is often the better value, but if your web app becomes a target, OVH's included DDoS mitigation is a critical advantage. To test disk performance, a key differentiator, run `fio --name=randwrite --ioengine=libaio --iodepth=32 --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --direct=1 --size=1G --numjobs=4 --runtime=60 --time_based --group_reporting` on a trial instance.

Choosing between Hetzner and OVH for a 4-core 16GB VPS, what's the real difference?

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