OpenLiteSpeed openlitespeed.org

Host-specific guides (but no hetzner):

docs.litespeedtech.com/cloud/images/wordpress/

Very easy, robust, fast.

You can def roll your own sever and solution, but WordPress needs a lot of help. As other commentors said, you need to bypass both the database and PHP as much as possible, via caching.

While a simple redis or valkey store solves that, you’re relying on some integration thru the php layer to make it happen, usually some plugin.

Serving files or otherwise caching directly thru the webserver is gonna make it faaaaast.

Then there’s the question of database writes. Who is writing to your database, where, and how often?