SSL Certificates, Reverse Proxies, and Cron Jobs: Why These Shouldn't Be Your Problem

You wanted to automate a workflow. Maybe spin up an n8n instance, or get Dify running for your team. So you did the sensible thing: you rented a $6/month VPS, spun up Ubuntu, and thought, "how hard can it be?" Three hours later you're deep inside an Nginx config, your Let's Encrypt cert keeps failing, your agent crashes at 3am because a cron job silently stopped, and the Docker container that hosts everything just ran out of memory — again. Welcome to the hidden tax of self-hosting . The Iceberg Nobody Shows You The demos make it look trivial. docker compose up , paste a URL, done. What those demos don't show is the operational layer sitting underneath every production deployment — the part that has nothing to do with your actual goal. Here's what running a single AI agent in production actually requires: 🔒 SSL Certificates You can't serve anything serious over plain HTTP in 2026. So you need HTTPS. That means: Installing Certbot (or figuring out Caddy, or configuring cloud provider AC