How do you host n8n for automations? I want to self-host since I'm out of budget, but I tried following your free self-hosting video and it's complicated. Can you clarify or help?
I don't actually recommend self-hosting for this — I'd recommend cloud hosting instead. It costs more, but the moment you deliver value for even one client (which cloud hosting lets you do much faster), you immediately pay back that added cost, because cloud hosting gets you up and running so fast. You never have to deal with Google auth setup or Cloud Console configuration for a bunch of the common self-hosting headaches — most of it's handled for you. I'd just recommend going with cloud hosting.
Honestly, nobody really knows for sure, and there hasn’t been any backlash yet. Many people using n8n to make money are on the self‑hosted version, but they usually just run the executions through their own endpoint rather than setting it up for the client, which adds nuance. If you want to play it safe, I’d recommend the cloud‑hosted offering: it’s easier, faster, you don’t have to mess with webhooks, and the platform handles reliable updates and server uptime for you. Yes, it costs more—around $50 a month for five workflows and 5‑10k executions—but when you’re delivering $5k‑$15k of value per client, that fee is negligible. So my recommendation is to go with cloud hosting.
Yes, the best option is to pay the default fee for a carefree experience with all the hassles. I'd love to see a video on this, as I was almost tempted to go self-hosting and learn the platform. I've tons of experience breakinging down barriers and obstacles of self-hosting and common apps affected by it, and how much more effort and time is needed to manage and maintain. Suffice to say, the reason I typically recommend cloud hosting everything is that you don't have to deal with deployment, DevOps, or additional environment variables and similar self-hosting concerns. As an automation specialist, believe it or not, your main point of value is not in your technical knowledge; it's in knowing just enough of the technicals to apply them to real business processes. Then you spend the rest of your time becoming a business person, a business expert. That's where the leverage lies with the alpha people who get really into self-hosting—they often lose the cart for the horse, spending so much time figuring out every little technical detail, spinning up Docker containers, getting environment variables right, and doing EngineX pass-through for webhook URLs. It's incredible how much time that takes. My recommendation is to focus on the things you actually get paid for—delivering value to your clients—not on designing the most optimal, technically and academically perfect solution.
I definitely go cloud‑hosted. It's just so much easier. With self‑hosting you run into DevOps and deployment concerns that are way above most people's pay grades. I often hit self‑hosted errors that can take hours to fix, and you also have to deal with Oauth setup—getting client IDs, client secrets, and configuring Google accounts, which is a massive pain. Cloud‑hosted avoids most of that and saves a lot of time.
They pay for cloud hosting on a monthly subscription and sign up themselves — I get them to create the account, guide them through it, and then they hand me the account access, since it's tied to their card. That's the 80/20 approach: guide them to create it, get access, but they own and pay for it.