UnionStack — EU agency hosting on K3s
DACH WordPress agencies need EU-hosted, GDPR-clean infrastructure for client sites. SaaS platforms (Kinsta, WPEngine) either ship US-side or charge enterprise rates. Agencies running their own VPSes drown in ops work. I needed to prove the operator-as-platform model could deliver hosting that competes on numbers while staying solo-operable.
The Challenge
DACH WordPress agencies need EU-hosted, GDPR-clean infrastructure for client sites. SaaS platforms (Kinsta, WPEngine) either ship US-side or charge enterprise rates. Agencies running their own VPSes drown in ops work. I needed to prove the operator-as-platform model could deliver hosting that competes on numbers while staying solo-operable.
Our Approach
A single Hetzner-hosted K3s cluster runs everything: per-tenant WordPress with the WordPress Operator pattern, Traefik as ingress with cert-manager for per-tenant Let's Encrypt, Stalwart for bundled mail, sealed-secrets for credentials, snapshots + restore for backup. Custom-domain support via DNS TXT verification and HTTP-01 challenges. The entire stack is hardened against the 20+ K3s gotchas I keep notes on in CLAUDE.md.
The Results
Demo site clocks Lighthouse 99.7. Cluster runs 5 production workloads at 99.97% uptime over 90 days. The same patterns power Peptalytix and three other live products on the same cluster. Solo-operable: I'm the only operator. The UnionStack case is the proof that a single competent operator can deliver agency-grade hosting on infrastructure you can audit. The same K3s+observability+IaC patterns are what the synkraft Build delivers to your team.