Here’s How I Damaged My N8n Service by Toying With Droplet Configuration

I broke my own server and I’m upset: imagine what kind of hell the AWS team went through yesterday, taking half of the world offline.

I am in a struggle to get my n8n service back online.

It all started with a good intention to secure my PostgreSQL database and make it more resilient against cyberattacks.

While I was doing it, I realized I couldn’t open my N8n workflow webpage anymore.

A few things could have caused it, so I quickly reverted my recent changes. But it still didn’t work. That’s when I realized I had changed two things at once.

I imagine something similar (just on a much larger scale) happened on AWS yesterday 😢.

ChatGPT description of the AWS event:

Yesterday’s AWS outage in the us-east-1 region was triggered by a widespread DNS resolution failure that rippled through their internal service network. DNS (Domain Name System) acts like the internet’s phonebook — when it breaks, servers can’t find each other even if they’re running fine. The issue brought down or degraded major platforms like Medium, Slack, and OpenAI’s API for hours. It’s a reminder that even at massive scale, a single layer of misconfiguration can cascade into a global disruption.

Back to my own DigitalOcean world, here are my two key lessons:

In DigitalOcean lingo

I had set PostgreSQL to only accept connections from localhost, which meant N8n (running separately in Docker) could no longer reach it. This realization came to me when I edited the docker-compose.yml: PostgreSQL was running outside Docker, while N8n was inside. Inside a container, localhost refers to the container itself — not the host machine. So, even though both were on the same droplet, they couldn’t see each other.

More DigitalOcean lingo

I should update PostgreSQL’s configuration to accept connections not only from localhost, but also from the droplet’s private or shared IP (something like 172.x.x.x, not 127.x.x.x).

So there is a chain of small problems, you just need to figure out which is which. Sounds simple or complex depending on who you are talking to 🤔.

Of course the AWS is on a completely different scale — they manage half the world’s apps. And they have teams of seasoned DevOps engineers, backed by unimaginable budgets. Unlike them, I’m just a developer-turned-self-taught-DevOps tinkering on a single droplet — on a shoestring, trying to limit em while writing.

But my little DigitalOcean mishap gave me a surprising amount of empathy for the AWS engineers. One wrong network configuration can cause chain reactions that aren’t easy to reverse.

Another reason for me to write this quick post after yesterday’s AWS failure, is to suggest to you maybe it’s time to gain some hands-on knowledge if you had been curious about the Cloud and how DevOps works.

If you’d like to learn more about Cloud, DigitalOcean, or the popular automation no-code tool N8N, head over to the very first post I have written on DigitalOcean to get started: Complete Guide: Self-Hosting n8n on DigitalOcean (Step by Step from Scratch)