I have a very small number of VPS with DO, so while this price increase is not impactful to me, it is somewhat shady how they portrayed this new pricing...not evil, just less than what i expected from DO. In paralell, for a couple of years now, i had heard of and been curious about Hetzner. But i was not as interested because their focus was in/around Europe, which i can't blame them. But, now that i see they have a data center in virginia area...well, now i'm going to start looking into them seriously. Their pricing is quite awesome...plus i have also recently heard of Contabo, and wow, their pricing is really awesome! Again, i'm not thinking that DO is evil or anything, but i appreciate that more and more i - as a small consumer fish - have much more choice!
Hetzner in general doesn't seem to be peered that well, such that using a Linode VPS near a Hetzner machine in Germany and then routing everything through the Linode VPS is much faster than going direct.
Yeah, we used Hetzner in Germany a lot at a former workplace where I was for a number of years, for production traffic, and we had a good experience. Most of our other infra was in physical DCs we owned, but we used Hetzner for production DR for the EU region, and also for internal stuff like CI/CD. Was slightly more reliable than AWS was at the time (2011-2014ish) , if I recall!