I’ve been building n8n-automations for my business for the last 6 months. The website were these automations are taking place is being released in the coming month(s) and i’ve, the past couple days for the most but more than usually for the the last month, started to have some issues with n8n Cloud.
I’m not gonna drag this out a lot but i’m writing this post because i haven’t been able to find proper answers to my question, which is:
What upsides, aswell as downsides, would i see if i were to move my n8n Cloud instance to self-hosted on e.g., Google Cloud Run?
My n8n Cloud instance include 20+ pretty advanced workflows, all highly important for my business’s website (not released yet). If my n8n Cloud instance would have issues at some point, the website’s main usage/features would not be able to run. Is this something that would be more robust and viable long term if ran as a self-hosted instance instead of n8n Cloud? How messy of a process would i have transfering my whole instance from n8n Cloud to self-hosted? Any consequences of doing this after building on n8n Cloud for half a year?
Super grateful to anybody who’s got anything to say!
Your main difference would be that you will now be responsible for all things maintenance, such as
regularly upgrading the n8n instance to the latest version
ensuring your server instance is secure and up to date
manage backups and any disaster recovery
scaling when needed
support will now fall on your shoulders
ensuring your infrastructure is setup as highly available (load balancers, DDOS protection, etc)
and so on
The benefits of the paid cloud instance is that the above maintenance tasks are handled for you including any support needed.
The benefit of self hosting however is that you will 100% have control over the n8n instance, how many server resources you want to throw at it (CPU, Memory and Disk Space) and all data that flows through it. You will also have unlimited amount of workflows you can have active, and there will be no monthly limits on how many executions you can run.
For special requirements you can buy an enterprise license and use it on your self hosted instance, such as SSO, git support and environments (for keeping you dev, test and prod separate and easy to deploy).
As for the migration process, you will likely lose any historic execution data for your workflows as well as having to go through all of the setup required such as database connections, authentication setup for all external services used etc etc.
Lastly, to your how messy this is question. This will all depend on how technically capable you are with setting up server etc, unless you have a technical person who will be doing this for you