HEARD: The pre-flight checklist before you self-host n8n for a client.

HEARD: The pre-flight checklist before you self-host n8n for a client.
With more teams moving off paid tiers, a source who runs n8n in production gave us the list that prevents 2am pages.
— Put it behind a reverse proxy with TLS and basic auth from day one
— Set N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY and back it up — lose it and every credential dies
— Use a real Postgres backend, not SQLite, the moment you cross hobby scale
— Pin the version; don't auto-update a workflow engine in production
— Schedule a nightly export of workflows and credentials to off-box storage
The horror stories all start with a lost encryption key and no backup. Watch this.