ETIMEDOUT Connection Timeout Renew license

Questions
1

Hello Team,

I have recently deployed a self-hosted instance of n8n on a Hostinger VPS using Docker Compose.
However, I am encountering some network connection issues:

  • When trying to activate my license, I get the following error:

Failed to renew license: renewal failed because current cert is not initialized

  • When attempting to connect to the OpenAI API, I receive this error:

The connection timed out, consider setting the 'Retry on Fail' option in the node settings
connect ETIMEDOUT 162.159.140.245:443

For context:

  • I am using a Traefik container as a reverse proxy in front of the n8n container.
  • A public DNS is configured and pointing correctly.
  • There are no outbound firewall restrictions on the server side.

At this point, I’m unsure where the issue lies — whether it’s a networking misconfiguration, Docker networking, or something else.

Has anyone faced a similar situation? Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

Was recently troubleshooting a very similar issue and resorted to configuring n8n to use an outbound proxy to narrow down whether the issue was inside n8n or somewhere outside of docker and/or the host machine.

Here are instructions for setting up the proxy, in case it might help you isolate where things are falling apart. What we found out was that there was already another outbound proxy that was configured with self-signed certificates. The error messages captured and reported by mitmproxy were better than what we could see in n8n.