GoKawiilA real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime.
Why We Migrated⌗
Running a software company in Turkey has become increasingly expensive over the last few years. Skyrocketing inflation and a dramatically weakening Turkish Lira against the US dollar have turned dollar-denominated infrastructure costs into a serious burden. A bill that felt manageable two years ago now hits very differently when the exchange rate has multiplied several times over.
Every month, we were paying $1,432 to DigitalOcean for a droplet with 192GB RAM, 32 vCPUs, 600GB SSD, two block volumes (1TB each), and backups enabled. The server was fine — but the price-to-performance ratio had stopped making sense.
Then we discovered the Hetzner AX162-R.
DigitalOcean Hetzner AX162-R CPU 32 vCPU AMD EPYC 9454P (48 cores / 96 threads) RAM 192 GB 256 GB DDR5 Disk 600 GB SSD + 2x1 TB volumes 1.92 TB NVMe Gen4 RAID1 Monthly Cost $1,432 $233 Savings — $1,199/month
That’s $14,388 saved per year — for a server that’s objectively more powerful in every dimension. The decision was easy.
I’ve been a DigitalOcean customer for nearly 8 years. They have a great product and I have no complaints about reliability or developer experience. But looking at those numbers now, I cannot help feeling a bit sad about all the extra money I left on the table over the years. If you are running steady-state workloads and not actively using DO’s ecosystem features, do yourself a favor and check dedicated server pricing before your next renewal.
What We Were Running⌗
This wasn’t a toy project. The stack included:
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