n8n Hosting with SSL — Secure Workflow Automation with HTTPS

n8n's web interface transmits sensitive data: your admin credentials when you log in, API keys and OAuth tokens when you configure credentials, and business data when you view execution results. Without SSL, all of this data travels in plain text, readable by anyone on the network path between your browser and the server.

Webhooks are equally sensitive. When external services send data to your n8n webhooks — customer orders, form submissions, payment notifications — that data must be encrypted in transit. Many services (Stripe, GitHub, Slack) require HTTPS webhook URLs and will refuse to send data to unencrypted endpoints.

SSL also prevents session hijacking. Without HTTPS, an attacker on the same network (coffee shop Wi-Fi, shared office network) can intercept your n8n session cookie and take over your account without knowing your password.

We configure Nginx as a reverse proxy with automatic Let's Encrypt certificate provisioning and renewal. Point your domain's DNS to your server's IP address, and our setup handles the rest — requesting the initial certificate, configuring Nginx to serve it, and setting up automatic renewal before expiration.

Let's Encrypt certificates are valid for 90 days. Our renewal process runs daily and renews certificates when they have 30 days remaining, providing ample buffer for any temporary renewal failures. If a renewal fails (typically due to DNS changes), our monitoring alerts us and we resolve the issue promptly.

Our Nginx SSL configuration uses TLS 1.3 by default with TLS 1.2 as a fallback for older clients. We disable SSLv3, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 — all known to have security vulnerabilities. Cipher suites are ordered to prefer AEAD ciphers (AES-256-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305) that provide both encryption and integrity checking.

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) headers tell browsers to always use HTTPS, preventing downgrade attacks. OCSP stapling reduces certificate verification latency by having Nginx serve the certificate's validation status directly. HTTP/2 is enabled for multiplexed connections and header compression, improving n8n's UI responsiveness.

These security settings score an A+ on SSL Labs' server test, demonstrating best-practice encryption configuration that protects your n8n instance and webhook endpoints against known attacks.

Use your own domain for n8n — automation.yourcompany.com, n8n.yourdomain.io, or any domain you control. We configure Nginx with your domain and provision an SSL certificate for it. If you need multiple subdomains (separate n8n instances for staging and production, for example), we can set up individual certificates for each or a wildcard certificate covering *.yourdomain.com.

For organizations that require Extended Validation (EV) or Organization Validated (OV) certificates for compliance reasons, we support installing custom certificates purchased from any certificate authority. Provide your certificate and private key, and we'll configure Nginx to serve them instead of Let's Encrypt certificates.

DNS configuration is simple: create an A record pointing your chosen subdomain to your server's IP address. We handle everything else — Nginx virtual host configuration, certificate provisioning, and n8n's WEBHOOK_URL environment variable update to ensure webhooks use your custom domain.