WordPress, Plesk or cPanel on a single box: not a fit
This is the largest slice of Hetzner customers and the one Hetscale does not serve: a stateful single box. The honest answer is a declined preflight with the reason, not a half-day setup that ends in a support ticket.
- Prerequisite work
- re-architecture
- Time to set up
- days
- Adapter
- none
- Fit
- 1/101 — preflight declines
Prerequisites, time and fit are the ADR-0028 row for this case. Hetscale's own setup is about 15 minutes in every case; the rest is work on your side.
Steps
- 01Why it is declined
Autoscaling clones and removes servers. A server that holds the database and the uploads cannot be cloned without splitting the data and cannot be removed without losing it. Preflight refuses the group and says so before anything is touched.
- 02What would change it
A database on its own server or a managed service, uploads in object storage, sessions outside the box, TLS at a load balancer, and a way to reproduce the web server (snapshot or cloud-init). That is a re-architecture measured in days, not a setting.
- 03What to do instead
Keep the box; size it for the peak. For a single server with stable load, one fixed server is cheaper than any control plane, and Hetscale says so on its own calculator.
FAQ for this case
Can Hetscale at least replace the box if it dies?
No. Healing creates a replacement from a template; a box with local state has no template that preserves its data. Use Hetzner’s own backups and snapshots for that server.
Will the trial tell me the same thing?
Yes, earlier: onboarding asks where the database is and how you deploy before any resource is read, and maps the answers to this case.