Security and maintenance with self-hosting

I’m considering moving our company automations from Zapier/Make to n8n.

Now if I understand correctly, we’d need the self-hosted version for being able to use our custom nodes that will be developed.

However, I have a team mate that has some concerns about self-hosting as we don’t have in-house capability. I think those concerns are valid.

What do you think?
What are ways to make this better way for us compared to what we get currently from Zapier when it comes to uptime, maintenance etc. ?

This is what this team mate said:
" given our current internal expertise, we should not pursue a self-hosted deployment.
Self-hosting introduces operational overhead, ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting of infrastructure. Additionally, relying on an external third party for the development of workflows, hosting and management is not advisable. Any disruptions, whether due to lapses in agreements or technical issues, could result in failed events that we do not have the in-house capability to recover efficiently.
"

What options do we have? I want to make sure things work smoothly, and we don’t need to worry about certain things over the weekend etc.
I was thinking maybe Google Cloud or AWS could give us enough up-time and we could probably have some sort of emergency service? Those devops services seem very expensive tho, but individuals are not 24/7 available.

Thanks!

You can use a service like Replit which handles the hosting, deployment, and acts as a code editor. They have AI tools you can use to literally just chat changes into existence.

I built a n8n self-hosted template over on Replit recently. One click and you have a full self-hosted n8n install ready to go. You just have to setup your Postgres database and Secret Keys (documentation is included with instructions, or you could just ask the AI agent to do this for you)

https://replit.com/@camerondwills/n8n-AI-native-workflow-automation

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Thanks! The concern is really about uptime and maintenance. I’m not sure how Replit would stand out in those. It’s a cool service tho.

Still interested in good solutions. Thanks