How to host n8n for $0.24/day (10 min set up)

What's up guys, in this video I wanted to go over by far the easiest and cheapest way to self-host NAN. If you clicked on this video and you've heard of self-hosting but you're not really too sure what it is, and I'll quickly break down what I actually mean when I say to self-host NAN. So if you look on the NAN pricing page, you'll see that they have standard plans like any software company, so £24, £60, and then an enterprise plan where you can get in contact with them. You can see for each of these plans they have a set amount of executions and a set amount of workflows. So for $60 you can have 10,000 executions and 15 active workflows, but then if you if you scroll down a little bit further, you'll see that they have a Community Edition. And basically what this means is because NAN is open source, that means all of the code that makes the software is just publicly available for free on GitHub. So what this means is you can run this code locally on your device and be able to use NAN for completely free. But the issue is, if you wanted to run this code truly locally on your device, there is a couple limitations of it. You would have access to unlimited workflows and unlimited executions because it's running on your device. You're not actually paying anyone else for a server, that's where the cost of the executions and the cost of the workflows come into play. If you're running it locally, then it means you're not paying for any of that. You get unlimited workflows and unlimited executions. But if you're running it locally, which means it's actually running on your laptop or on your computer, it means that one, when you're not actually using NAN, the server will be down, which means it can't receive any information and any active workflows won't be running when you're not actually on the platform. And then two, you can't connect to a lot of external services, things like Gmail, Google Calendar, HubSpot, anything like that, you can't really connect to when you're running it locally. So the solution to this is to host it in the cloud. So still using the community version, which is the version that is on GitHub, which is just the free open source version of NAN, and then hosting it with a provider. And the benefit of this is even though now you're paying a provider to host this, it's going to be cheaper than NAN, and you will still get access to that unlimited workflow and unlimited executions. And now there are a lot of different providers that you can use to self-host NAN, but in this video we're going to be using Hostinger because like I said, it's by far the easiest to set up and probably the cheapest for the amount that you actually get. So we're going to jump into how it looks to host with Hostinger and also compare some of its pricing plans to some other competitors. So first thing you're going to do is you're going to come over to Hostinger, and this is just on their homepage. If you go to services, then you can see they have the dedicated NAN VPS hosting, which just means with one click you can self-host NAN, pay them a small fee, and then you get access to that unlimited workflows and unlimited execution. So now we're on here, if we scroll down, you can see the plans, and in here, this is basically what you're actually getting from the server. So you can see down here there are a bunch of different things, and the main things you need to look at is the CPU cores and the gigabytes of RAM. So this is basically just going to be indicators of how powerful your servers are, because when you're self-hosting NAN, obviously you have control over the server, which means you kind of need to monitor it a little bit and manage it a little bit. Because although you do get access to unlimited executions and unlimited workflows, if your NAN instance is using too much power— let's say you're doing massive inputs, massive outputs and you're running loads and loads of workflows at the same time, sometimes it can overload your server. So it just means more powerful servers can obviously handle more, less powerful servers can obviously handle less. So in my opinion, this here is the best plan. You can see it's the most popular, the KVM 2 plan, and it's super, super cheap. So $6.99 per month. This is on a 24-month term contract, so we can get into the other contracts, but it's still super cheap and way cheaper than any other hosting platform. We're actually going to have a look at some of the other hosting platforms so you can sort of compare them side by side and see the difference in costs, and then also the difference in CPUs and RAM that you get. So I use ChatGPT to analyze some of the top hosting platforms so you can see, like I said, side by side the different plans, how much they cost, and what you're actually getting for that. So for Hostinger, the KVM 2, it's $6.99 per month and you get 2 CPUs and 8GB of RAM. And then Render, which is where I was hosting NAM before, you can see for this around the same price $7 a month, you get 0.5 CPUs and 512 megabytes of RAM. So pretty much the exact same price, and you obviously get way less for the price. And then Railway, this is another very popular hosting platform for NAN. This one's slightly different because you pay for usage. It's not like a set fee, and then you get X amount of RAM and X amount of CPUs. So for this one, ChatGPT estimated that for about the same thing, for 2 CPUs and even less RAM, for 2 gigabytes of RAM, it'll cost around $15 to $30 per month for that. But of course it's usage-based, so you can't say exactly how much it's going to cost. And then Slipplane, this one is $10 a month and you get 2 CPUs and 2 gigabytes of RAM. And then FlyIO is $17 to $25 a month and you get 2 CPUs and 2 gigabytes of RAM. So you can see side by side next to these other hosting platforms how much better Hostinger is. And we haven't even got into how easy it is to actually set up the hosting for NAN with Hostinger, this is just purely on what you get for your money. So your bang for your buck, it's way better on Hostinger. Now we're going to get into actually setting up your NAN instance with Hostinger. So all you're going to do is you're going to hit choose plan. If we're going with this one, which like I said, I'd recommend going with this one, and then here you can see the different contracts. So you can go 1 month, which would be $9.99 per month, 12 months, which would equate to $8.49 per month, or 24 months, which is going to be $6.99 per month. So I would recommend, if you can afford it, going for the 12-month plan because $108, so just over $100, you can get N8N for an entire year and your server can be strong enough to handle pretty much anything you're going to be doing. You could be running loads and loads and loads of different workflows all executing at the same time. Pay $100 for the year and you can just have that for the whole year. And also, while you're here, just remember to put in the coupon code Rory. Hostinger were nice enough to sponsor this video. I've wanted to do a video like this for a little while on how to host N8N because a lot of people have asked me that before, and Hostinger reached out to me and I checked it out and this is by far the best place I've seen to actually host NAN. Cheapest, easiest to set up. So they're sponsoring this video and the code is Rory. So if you put in the code Rory, you can get 10% off the price of this. So I'll leave a link in the description. If you follow my link and use this code, 10% off, and it'll be even cheaper for you to host NAN. Okay, then if we scroll down, you can see we have server locations. This is going to be where your server is that you're hosting NAN. So for me, United Kingdom is going to have the best latency because I'm in the United Kingdom. But if you're in America, you might pick one of these ones, or in India India or in South America. So it will show you which one has the best latency. Unless you have some kind of preference, I would recommend just going with the one that has the best latency. So for me, it's United Kingdom. You can see down here, NAN has already been selected, so that's absolutely perfect. Now we can just hit continue, and then if I sign into my account— if you don't have an account, then of course you can just make one, but I'm just going to sign into my account. So hit login. Okay, cool. So now obviously you just have to add in the billing information, so I'm going to do that and I'll come back to you. Okay, perfect. So just added my payment information, that's all gone through. If I hit get started and then it's just going to guide us through the process. So we can hit continue here, and then let's create a password. So it's going to be the password that we use for this NAN instance, so you can do anything you like here. Okay, cool. So added in my password, let's hit continue, and then finish setup. And you can see that's literally it. So now this is setting up our instance for NAN. So if we just hit back, obviously I already have one here that's stopped at the moment, but this is the new one that we just created. So it's going to say creating for about a minute, only takes about a minute, and then once that's set up, we can actually start using NAN. So we're going to come back when this is done. Okay, so you can see now this says running. So if we hit on manage, this is where you're going to be able to manage sort of your entire server for NAN. So if you see here, we have overview. So you can see a bunch of different stuff. You can see the server location, the operating system, hostname, VPS uptime, the SSH username, the IPv4. Don't have to worry too much about this. If you don't really know what it means. But of course, if you do know what it means, then you can look at all of this. Then you also just have your AI assistant where you can just ask anything you like about the, um, NAN instance. If you have any questions, you're not too sure on anything, you can just use the AI assistant. If we go to settings, this is where all your settings for your server are going to be. And then one of the main things as well, if you go to backups and monitoring and then go to server usage in here— of course I haven't started using the server yet, but this is where you're going to see all of your server usage. So if you're doing something crazy on there and you're really, really running the server, you'll be able to see on here how much you're actually using And maybe if you need to dial it back, like I said, you probably won't need to with the amount of CPU and RAM that you're getting on this. But for whatever reason, if you want to look at the usage, you can see all the usage here and see sort of how your server's performing and the health of it. So now this is actually running. So what we can do is we can go to Manage App. And here, if you already have an NAN account, of course you can log in, but if not, you can just create a new one. So I'm going to create a new one. Okay, cool. So I've just put in an email, first name, last name, and then password. And if we hit next, obviously it's going to ask you these questions. You can just go through and put pretty much anything you like. Uh, okay, cool. And then hit get started. Send me a free license key— this will actually send you over a license key which gives you some access to some additional features. So you can do that if you like, but you don't have to. And then yeah, now you're in NAN and you can use NAN completely as you would before, but of course this time you get unlimited executions and unlimited workflows. So you're not restricted by hosting it on the actual NAN server. So paying NAN to host this and using their server and getting restricted to the— I think it was like 5 workflows or 15 workflows for like £60 a month, which is pretty expensive. With this, you get unlimited workflows, unlimited execution. So if we wanted to create a new workflow, just hit Start from Scratch. Then you can see here I can just create a workflow doing absolutely anything I want. Also, another thing as well, if we come back over to hosting it, if you see when we're using this it's hosted on this URL here. And if you wanted to change this for whatever reason, you can always go to DNS Manager, and in here you can enter your domain name, and then you can have it host on that domain rather than this domain here. So yeah, that is it for the video, guys. As I mentioned earlier in the video, I have been wanting to do a video like this for a little while on how to actually self-host N8N because I self-host it, and a lot of other people that you probably watch on YouTube also are self-hosting it. So when Hostinger reached out to me and I checked out their plans, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make a video for you guys on how to self-host N8N and also give you a little discount code so you can get it for even cheaper. So I hope this video helps you, and I hope now you can create absolutely anything you want on NAM with unlimited workflows, unlimited executions, and you can have a really, really powerful server. So that is it for the video, guys. I'll see you in the next one.