An honest, detailed comparison between Hostingowy's bare metal UK hosting and DigitalOcean's cloud droplets. We cut through the marketing to show you what matters for your business.
Try Hostingowy Free → First Month Free with LAUNCH100For UK-based businesses and EU customers needing GDPR-compliant hosting, Hostingowy offers better value — especially for steady-state workloads where DigitalOcean's "cloud tax" adds up. DigitalOcean excels if you need their managed Kubernetes (DOKS), App Platform, or global POP distribution. For most VPS and dedicated workloads in the UK/EU market, Hostingowy's bare metal performance at equivalent pricing is hard to beat.
| Feature | 🏠 Hostingowy | ☁️ DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | Own bare metal hardware (KVM) | Virtualised cloud (shared infrastructure) |
| Data Centres | European data centres (Poland) | 15 global regions (1 UK: London) |
| Starting Price (VPS) | $5/mo (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB NVMe) | $6/mo (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD) |
| Storage Type | NVMe SSD (ZFS with lz4 compression, snapshots) | SSD (ext4, no built-in snapshots on basic droplets) |
| CPU | Dedicated CPU cores (no neighbour noise) | Shared vCPU (noisy neighbour possible) |
| Monitoring | Free Grafana + Prometheus included | Monitoring add-on ($15/mo per droplet) |
| Managed WordPress | $100/mo (2 sites, staging, backups, CDN) | Not available natively (DIY or marketplace) |
| Object Storage | $30/TB/mo | $5/TB/mo (Spaces) |
| Managed Databases | Coming soon | Yes (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis) |
| Kubernetes | Custom setup | Managed Kubernetes (DOKS) |
| Bandwidth (VPS) | Unmetered (10TB at max speed, then throttled) | 1-6 TB included, then overage charges |
| GDPR Compliance | By default (EU data centres) | EU region available (DPA required) |
| Support | Real UK engineers (the people who built it) | Ticket-based support (outsourced) |
| Free Migration | Yes — full assessment and migration assistance | Self-service (tooling provided) |
| Referral Program | 20% recurring commission | $25 one-time credit |
| Uptime SLA | 99.95% | 99.99% |
| Use Case | 🏠 Hostingowy | ☁️ DigitalOcean | Hostingowy Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small App / API | $5/mo (2 vCPU, 4GB, 80GB NVMe) | $6/mo (1 vCPU, 1GB, 25GB SSD) | 4x RAM, 3x storage for less |
| Medium App / DB | $20/mo (4 vCPU, 8GB, 160GB NVMe) | $24/mo (2 vCPU, 4GB, 80GB SSD) | 2x CPU/RAM for less |
| Large App / High Traffic | $50/mo (6 vCPU, 16GB, 320GB NVMe) | $48/mo (4 vCPU, 8GB, 160GB SSD) | 2x RAM, 2x storage for ~same price |
| Business / Dedicated CPU | $100/mo (8 vCPU, 32GB, 640GB NVMe) | $96/mo (8 vCPU, 16GB — Premium Intel) | 2x RAM, 4x storage for ~same price |
| Dedicated Hardware | $1,500/mo (full bare metal server) | N/A (cloud droplets only) | Full hardware isolation |
We'll assess your current DigitalOcean setup, plan the migration, and move your workloads to Hostingowy — at no cost. Our engineers handle the entire process, including DNS transfer, database migration, and SSL setup.
First month free with code LAUNCH100 — zero risk, full support.
Start Your Free Migration →For most workloads, yes. Because we use bare metal servers with KVM virtualization and NVMe storage (ZFS), you get dedicated CPU cores and faster I/O. DigitalOcean droplets run on shared infrastructure where your neighbour's usage can impact your performance.
Our servers are in European data centres (Poland). We're a UK-registered company with UK-based support engineers, providing the best of both worlds — UK legal jurisdiction with European infrastructure.
Yes. We support all major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Fedora) plus FreeBSD. Custom ISO upload is available for enterprise customers.
DigitalOcean's community tutorials are excellent. The good news is almost all of them work on Hostingowy too — our servers run standard Linux. Plus we're building our own knowledge base with UK-specific hosting guides.
First month free with LAUNCH100. Real UK engineers, bare metal performance, transparent pricing.
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