Onboarding cases
Where you start decides how long setup takes and how well Hetscale fits. Find your row; each case has its own page with the steps.
Onboarding asks four questions before any resource is touched: is there a load balancer, is the app behind Cloudflare, where is the database, how do you deploy. The answers map to one of these cases with a fit score and an up-front time estimate. Hetscale's own setup is about 15 minutes in every case; the rest is prerequisite work on your side.
| Case | Prerequisite work | Time | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| One app, Hetzner LB, 2+ servers, registry image | none | 15–20 min | 10/10 |
| Campaign / e-commerce with LB | none; wants scheduled scaling | 20 min | 9/10 |
| One app, one server, behind Cloudflare proxy, no CF LB | Cloudflare Load Balancing, pool and origin, firewall to CF IPs | 30–45 min | 8/10 |
| Coolify multi-server ready | none | 20–30 min | 8/10 |
| CI/SSH deploy, 1–3 servers behind Hetzner LB | deploy to the IP Hetscale sends | 1–2 h | 8/10 |
| Stateless API, managed DB, one server, no LB | LB only | 1 h | 7/10 |
| One app, one server, no LB, Compose, TLS on the box, external DB | Hetzner LB (€7.49/mo), TLS to LB, DNS to LB | 1–2 h | 6/10 |
| Kamal | host list from the inventory API (recipe) | 1–2 h | 6/10 |
| Two apps, two servers, no LB | two LBs or CF LB with two pools | 2–3 h | 5/10 |
| Forge / Ploi | native adapter not in MVP | half day | 4 → 8/10 |
| Coolify, single server, app + DB together | move DB out, registry image, LB, proxy setting | half day to a day | 3 → 7/10 |
| WordPress / Plesk single box, local MySQL | re-architecture | days | 1/10 |
| CI/SSH deploy, no LB | both of the above: the load balancer and the deploy to the IP Hetscale sends | 2–3 h | 6/10 |
| Queue worker scaling | queue-depth metric (agent) | — | post-MVP |
The fit-1 case is declined by preflight with the reason. Users without a load balancer get a "get LB-ready" checklist: a Hetzner load balancer (€7.49 per month) or Cloudflare Load Balancing, TLS moved to it, DNS pointed at it. Onboarding recommends a minimum of 2 nodes for zero-downtime healing.