The Cheapest & Easiest Way to Self-Host n8n (Beginner's Guide)

As a non-techie or someone with not really a formal DevOps background, the thought of self-hosting n8n was always a little bit intimidating to me. And so if that's how you're feeling right now, just stick with me for the rest of this video because I'm going to show you guys the best and easiest way to self-host your n8n, which will save you money and you won't have to worry about all the hardware requirements. But real quick, why should you self-host your n8n? Well, just to list off a few of these bullet points here, you get full control over your data, no limits on workflows or executions, cost-effectiveness at high usage, unlimited customization, compliance with strict data regulations, and the ability to deeply integrate with local or private AI models. But if those really aren't resonating with you, I'm just going to boil it down to 3, or I guess 4 words, which would be cheaper, safer, and more powerful. So in this video, I'm going to show you guys why you should self-host Ennitin with Hostinger VPS, which is what I personally use to self-host my Ennitin. Now what I think is huge is we have a one-click installation, so I'm going to walk you guys through step by step in this video how that all works. It's built for scalability and high performance. You're gonna get automatic backups so you can really just be able to sleep at night knowing your workflows and data are not gonna be lost. They have a really cool AI VPS assistant, which I will show you guys once we get in there. And Hostinger specifically built this to host n8n, so you can also get 100 free ready-to-use workflows. And this honestly may be a bit conservative, but you can save up to 4 times your expenses compared to if you hosted on n8n Cloud. And if you follow along with the rest of this video, I'll show you guys how you can save even more and get 10% off. So we're gonna hop over to Hostinger, and like I said, I'm gonna walk you guys through everything step by step. And then after that, we're gonna come back real quick, and I'm just gonna talk a little bit more about self-hosting versus cloud hosting and which one might be right for you. Okay, so here we are in Hostinger VPS, and what you'll first notice is that this isn't just a VPS provider or a virtual private server provider. This is specifically built for NNN. We've got the NNN logo here, we have NNN self-hosting, and we also have these bullet points which are pretty specific to NNN. And you can also see in the bottom right we have Cody, which is the AI VPS assistant. There's also a huge Black Friday sale going on, so this video is very timely. If you're watching it early enough, make sure you go grab this discount. But anyways, if I click on Claim Deal, it's gonna bring us down to the different options. We have KVM 1, 2, 4, and 8, and then we have these different hardware specs as far as CPU cores, RAM, and storage. Now if you're like me and you don't really know a ton about hardware, then this might not mean much to you. And what I would typically do is go to Perplexity and say, hey, I've got these 5 workflows, each of them run 20 times a day. Um, which of these options should I start with? And it will be able to break it down for you a little bit. But the good news is it doesn't really matter because let's say you choose this one and you realize you need more, you can just upgrade your plan and you can just scale up as your usage scales up. And if you're confused with that, once again, you can use Perplexity or you can come in here and talk to Cody about it and you'll be all set. So anyways, for the sake of the video today, I'm gonna go with KVM2 and I'm gonna go ahead and choose this plan. So the first thing to do is choose your period. So you can choose 1 month, you can choose 12 months, or you can choose 24 months. Now you can see if you go with 24 months, for the first 2 years you're getting that for $6 a month, and the Enidn Cloud starter plan is like $25 a month or something like that. You're also getting a free domain for a year, which is pretty cool. And then for $6 extra bucks a month, you can add on the daily automated backups. From there, you would go ahead and choose a server location. So you would just choose one close to you for the best latency. And then you can go ahead and choose an application. So we've got n8n here. You could also choose n8n with 100 workflows or n8n with queue mode. And of course there's more options and all of this can be changed later. So for the sake of the video, I'm just gonna go with the regular n8n right now. And now here's where you can save an additional 10%. So if you choose any of the yearly plans, so 12 months or 24 months, you can go ahead and add a coupon code and just do all caps NATHURK. And when you apply that, it's gonna give you an additional 10% off. Oh, also, if you're in my Plus community, AI Automation Society Plus, then I've got a special discount code for you guys that will get you even more than 10% off. So make sure you check out the Plus community. Link for that will be down in the description. And one final thing I wanted to make sure I was transparent about before you guys go ahead and purchase a subscription here is that yes, I did work with Hostinger to do this video and to bring you guys a discount code, but this is actually where I'm hosting my NNN myself, and I definitely believe in what they're doing here, which is why I'm kind of recommending that you guys take this approach as well. But anyways, now that that's been said, let me go ahead and move forward with this payment, and then I'll see you guys on the other side. All right, payment has been processed. Let's go ahead and get started setting up our VPS. The first thing you have to do is just set a root password so you can log into your VPS. You can also add an SSH key, but it says you can also do this later, so we're just going to set a password right now. It also lets you add a free malware scanner, which you could turn off, but we'll just leave it on and hit Finish Setup. So now it's setting up a VPS. It'll take a few minutes. There's some resources we can look at here, but I'll just check back in with you guys when this is finished up. All right, so that just finished up. We can go ahead and manage our app and we can manage our VPS. So I'm going to first of all go to manage VPS so we can see what the dashboard actually looks like when we want to be able to change things up. All right, so here is our dashboard overview. You can see that we have a KVM2 which is currently running and we have a root password right here that we've set. This is where we'd be able to go ahead and reboot it if we want to. And also this little AI thing, we can ask Cody for help if we need help. Now we also have 3 of the most common questions that I get about self-hosting, which is how to update NNN, Changing the domain for N8N and resetting the N8N user password. So any of these little resources that you click into, it's going to be some extensive documentation from Hostinger on how to use their VPS and do whatever you need to do. So if we scroll down a little bit more, you can see your current plan, you can see the expiration date, auto-renewal, you can see your specs, and this is where you could also go ahead and upgrade your plan if you realize you need more memory or something like that. So I'll click around in a few more places and show you guys what is important information to know. But real quick, what you guys probably wanna see is how it actually works with N8N. So I'm gonna go ahead and click Manage App. As you can see, this just spun up our new Anyday account. So I'm just gonna real quick set this up. We have to do our fun little onboarding real quick, and then it's gonna pop up and say get paid features for free forever. So you want to get this free activation key so you can have workflow history, advanced debugging, execution search and tagging, and folders. So put in the email that you want to get this stuff sent to, and then go ahead and click Send Me a Free License Key, and it will send you that email. Down on the bottom right, it says your license key's on the way, and you want to click on your usage and plan. And this is where you can go ahead and enter that activation key that that just emailed you, and then that's how you'll get all those features. But what you can see here is this is the typical end-to-end that you're used to. You can go ahead and create a new workflow and it will pull up and everything is going to look the exact same as your cloud version, except for you're no longer being tracked on executions and you don't have a cloud admin dashboard panel for you to go update your instance. You would be taking care of all of that kind of stuff in your Hostinger dashboard. All right, so let's talk about a few more things that you can do in this dashboard. So the first thing you can do is you can go ahead and claim a free.cloud domain for your hostname. And then there's documentation right here on how you actually can connect that in here. But also, if you already have a different domain that you want to connect, you could just go over here to Domains and then go to your domain portfolio. And then in here, you can just transfer that one over. But I totally get it, there's lots of buttons over here and lots of things to look at and click on. But the truth is, you probably won't have to ever click into some of these. So I'm just going to show you some of the important ones to keep in mind. So the first thing is just your settings. In here you can change your password, you can reset your firewall configuration, you can change your hostname. And so right now you guys can't see it, but my URL up here, when I go to my Hostinger Cloud, it says, you know, n8n.srv— all these random numbers—.hostinger.cloud. But if I go to my n8n Cloud version, it says, you know, nate.app.n8ncloud. And that's just kind of like the hostname that you can go ahead and change right here. Another important thing to be looking at is this tab, Backups and Monitoring. So you can go ahead and see latest actions, you can see server usage, and you can also see snapshots and backups. We just created this one, so there's no actual backups or snapshots yet, but you can see right now that our backup schedule is on daily, and you can go ahead and change that right there. And you'll notice all of these tabs will have related articles down here at the bottom, and there's even a full tab right here called Tutorials, which will be able to walk you through pretty much everything that you need to know about hosting your VPS and hosting N8N specifically on it. So one more thing I actually wanted to walk you guys through step by step because it might seem a little intimidating is actually updating N8N. So there is that little tutorial right here and it walks you through the 4 simple steps. But I just want to show you guys what that actually looks like. So we're going to go back into the overview of our dashboard and right here we're going to click on Terminal. This is going to open up the actual terminal where we can copy and paste in these commands that it gives us to update our N8N. So this is what it looks like. I know it's scary and honestly not fun to look at, but all we have to do is go back into here. Copy this command that says docker compose pull. And once we go ahead and paste this in there and hit enter, it will go ahead and pull the latest version of N8N. All right. So you can see that it pulled both of those things. It took about 20 seconds. Now I'd go back into this tutorial. I would copy this next one, which says docker compose down, which is basically going to stop and remove the currently running containers. I'll paste that in there, hit enter. And now this is going to basically just stop those two. And you can see this is called root-n8n and root-traffic. If I go back into the dashboard and we go right here to our Docker Manager for N8N, This is where you can see these two containers that it's referring to right now, that it basically is just going to stop and update, and then we're going to turn back on. So you can see down here it said that it removed all of those. And if I go back into my Docker Manager and I hit this with a quick refresh, we should now see that there's nothing in there currently running. So now we just have to spin them back up. I'm going to go back into the tutorial. I'm going to copy this last command to update that image and pull it back in. Oops, I accidentally pasted in the wrong thing. So let me go ahead and grab this one again and paste it in correctly this time. And now it should— when I hit enter. All right, so I just messed up and I pasted it in wrong twice. So now that I have it pasted in correctly and I go ahead and hit run, you can see it's actually going to work. So as long as you don't make the mistake I did, and I don't know how I copied the wrong value, but I did. Just make sure you copy exactly what's right here and you'll be all good to go. It's just those 3 simple steps. So there we go. We have the network started and we have those 2 containers back up and running. I'm going to go into my Docker Manager. I'm going to hit a quick refresh and we should see that we now have those things up and running once again. There we go. We've got these two containers. And if I go back into my overview and I want to go ahead and open up my NN, we should see that this is working. And let me prove to you guys that this is recently updated by going into a workflow and grabbing a guardrail node, which was literally just added like yesterday at the time of filming. So you can see that we have successfully updated our NN instance. All right guys, so as I was editing this video, I realized there was one more thing that I didn't quite make super clear that I'd love to, because it could be scary. When you go to update your N8N and you do that whole Docker Compose pull, Docker Compose down, Docker Compose up, that's not going to get rid of any of your credentials or your workflows that you have saved in N8N. And essentially what's going on behind the scenes with that Docker stuff is it's saving volume and it's storing volume, which is basically it's memory about your workflows and credentials and stuff like that. So I'm not gonna dive into exactly what that all means, but if you're interested in just understanding a little bit more, then I would definitely check out this video where I kind of explain it. This was a YouTube video that I made where I actually showed how to locally host N8N agents, which is different than what we're doing on a VPS. So if you want to check that out, I'll just tag it up there. It's a really short video, but it might just explain a little bit more about how the whole Docker containers and volumes and images work together. And then also, now that I threw some workflows in this N8N instance, we can see that our dashboard is showing us stuff like CPU usage, memory usage, incoming traffic, outgoing traffic, disk usage, and bandwidth. And so these are kind of good metrics you can monitor on your dashboard to understand if you need to scale up any of your resources. And once again, if you don't understand exactly what all this stuff means, just work with Perplexity or work with your Cody AI assistant right here about your VPS health, your connectivity, whatever it is over here. All right, so hopefully you guys feel comfortable with everything that we just looked at in the Hostinger dashboard. And just remember that you can always use the Cody assistant and there's tons of articles and resources on there. Now what I wanted to end the video off with is actually like, what are some of the other differences between Ennitin Cloud and Ennitin self-hosting? Because for a complete beginner, I would pretty much always recommend just starting on cloud to get a feel for everything. So let me just read off these pros and cons and then I'll talk a little bit deeper about it. So Ennitin Cloud, super easy setup. It's a managed service, meaning Ennitin is hosting all that and controlling it. You have certain features in the Ennitin Cloud version like the AI Workflow Builder that you don't have in self-hosted versions of Ennitin. So this is my cloud account. If I go into create a workflow, you can see that we have the option right here to build with AI, and we also have an AI assistant on this right-hand side, sort of like what Cody is to Hostinger. We have this in here for editing cloud to help us build workflows and things like that. And if I go back into my self-hosted version on Hostinger and I go to create a new workflow, we don't have the ability to build with AI, or we don't have the ability to ask the AI assistant in here questions. Editing Cloud also makes it a little bit easier for collaboration and projects within your cloud environment, because in my Editing Cloud, you can see that I can add different projects, and in this project I can add different members, different roles, and we can have shared credentials within a specific project. But in our self-hosted version of n8n, we only have the main overview. There's no ability to add different projects. As you can see, you would need to have the enterprise self-hosted version of n8n. And really the trade-off there is because self-hosting n8n is a lot cheaper, if you wanted to have like different projects with different roles and stuff, I would just spin up like different apps for each of your n8n environments. And then for cons of n8n Cloud, we've got cost, limited customization, data privacy, and certain feature limits. And it's kind of funny because the pros of self-hosting are kind of the cons of cloud and then vice versa. But for self-hosting, you have the pros of full control over everything. You know where everything's going and you can keep it all in your own environment on your own virtual private server. Unlimited workflows and executions, much more cost effective, data privacy, and you don't have vendor lock. So you could move all of your workflows to a different VPS provider if you wanted to. You could also, of course, do that with cloud, but just wanted to throw that out there. Now the cons of self-hosting, of course, are technical setup. Luckily, with this one-click installation that we just walked through, it is a lot easier to do. Maintenance is on you, and maybe that doesn't mean specifically you, but it means whatever VPS provider you go with, that's where you'll have to work with maintenance. You don't get features like the AI Workflow Builder and any potential future features that n8n.cloud may release. But that's also subject to change. This is just as of November 2025. Limited collaboration because of the whole projects thing. And then you don't get any official support from N8N to host it. But once again, in this case, you would get official support from Hostinger VPS if you needed to get on a call and troubleshoot certain things. So just wanted to give a quick snapshot of the cloud versus self-hosting and maybe where you are in your journey, what makes sense to do. Just remember, if you are working with clients and you're basically helping them spin up instances and consult and implement products for them, You cannot charge for access to N8N, whether that's cloud or self-hosting. You can help them do it, but you should just be having them put in their billing information, own the accounts, and then you can be in there as like an advisor and a builder and whatever it is. Just wanted to also make that part very clear. But I don't want this video to go too long, so I hope that you guys enjoyed or you learned something new. If you're interested in diving deeper with N8N, automation, and working with clients, then definitely check out my paid community. The link for that is down in the description. And remember, you can also get a larger discount off if you join the Plus community. I'll have a coupon code in there for you guys. So I'd love to see you guys in the community, in the live calls. But that's going to do it for today. So once again, if you enjoyed or learned something new, please give it a like. It definitely helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I'll see you on the next one. Thanks, everyone.