ADR-0003 — Hosting: Ploi & Hetzner¶
| Status | Accepted |
| Date | 2025 |
| Deciders | Flooris development team |
Context¶
The Zwerfkei platform requires reliable hosting across three environments: test, acceptance and production. Servers must be manageable without requiring deep DevOps expertise, while remaining cost-effective and performant within the European region.
Decision¶
Hetzner Cloud is used as the cloud infrastructure provider. Ploi is used as the server management platform on top of Hetzner to handle server provisioning, PHP/Nginx configuration, SSL certificates, deployments and queue/scheduler management.
Rationale¶
- Hetzner provides high-performance, European (GDPR-compliant) cloud servers at competitive pricing.
- Ploi abstracts server management complexity, enabling the development team to manage deployments, environments and services without manual server administration.
- Ploi integrates directly with GitHub, enabling automatic deployment pipelines triggered by branch pushes or GitHub Actions.
- The Ploi + Hetzner combination is already in use within Flooris for other projects, reducing operational overhead.
Environments¶
| Environment | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Test | Internal testing by the development team. Deployed automatically on merge to develop. |
| Acceptance | Stakeholder review and UAT. Deployed on demand or via pipeline. |
| Production | Live environment. Deployed on merge to main after acceptance sign-off. |
Consequences¶
- Server provisioning and SSL certificate management are handled via the Ploi dashboard.
- Deployment scripts and environment variables are managed per environment in Ploi.
- Hetzner regions should be selected within the EU (e.g. Falkenstein, Nuremberg) for data residency compliance.