What it is
In plain words โ your own private cloud server where you are the only owner, rather than a third-party service like Zapier or Make. Nobody can restrict your access, raise the price retroactively or shut the service down one morning.
How we use it
We deploy your automation, bots and internal services on it. The downside: full control means full responsibility โ the server needs maintenance, updates and monitoring. Usually we take care of that ๐
Where self-hosting helps a business
- A cloud service charges for every workflow run, and the bill grows faster than the business.
- Because of regional restrictions, a team loses access to its work tools overnight.
- Customer data, correspondence or crash reports must not go to someone else's cloud.
- You need your own calls and chat that do not depend on an external messenger and its blocks.
Self-hosted and SaaS
| Self-hosted | SaaS (cloud service) |
|---|
| Where the data is | on your server | on the service's servers |
| Control | you decide what is on and who has access | the service decides for you and may drop a feature or a country |
| Updates | installed when you decide; someone has to install them | arrive by themselves, sometimes breaking what you are used to |
| Cost | the server and maintenance, no charge per step | a subscription, often with plan limits |
| Responsibility | whoever maintains it answers for backups, certificates and failures | the service answers for uptime; nobody there answers for your data personally |
How we use it
- Automation. n8n runs on the client's server rather than on a cloud plan: there is no limit on executions, only the server itself. Workflows are exported as JSON and kept in git: lead automation.
- Access to work tools. For an IT company we deployed a corporate gateway on its own servers: Canva, Notion, Jira and AI tools are reachable again, and corporate data does not pass through public services.
- Communication. Peregovorka is voice, chat and streaming on your own server: voice goes directly between participants, and 90 days of chat history sit in SQLite on your machine.
- Mail and websites. The websites server has its own domain mail, every site in its own Docker network, and certificates that renew themselves.
- Crash reports. Our apps send logs to our own receiver, not to a third-party service.
We set up and maintain this under Infrastructure.
Common problems
- Someone has to look after the server. Updates, backups, certificate renewal, disk space. Without maintenance something breaks within a year.
- The hosting provider may close ports. Our websites server's provider blocks outgoing mail ports: receiving works, sending waits in a queue.
- Memory neighbours. A VPN relay with 1.9 GB of memory once went down because of a neighbouring service, after which the sites moved to a separate server.
- A small server cannot build the project. The Nuxt site is built on a workstation and uploaded as a ready image, because the server lacks the memory to build it.
When it makes sense
When a service becomes a long-term part of the business: it brings in leads, holds customer data, must keep working under restrictions. And when a cloud plan's price grows with the number of operations.
When it does not
When you are testing an idea for a month, there is little data and nobody will maintain a server. A cloud service is cheaper and simpler then, and you can move to your own server later.