Managed hosting from
£45/month equivalent +VAT
Medium resource profile: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB SSD storage. Typically suits a site or estate whose devices report over MQTT to your own broker. Billed hourly against our rate card with no commitments; deployment, upgrades, daily backups, monitoring, SSL and UK hosting included, with no per-user fees. How our pricing works
Automation you own, hosted properly
Home Assistant is the open source automation platform that talks to thousands of device types without sending your telemetry to a manufacturer's cloud. Most installations run on a box in a cupboard, unbacked-up and unpatched, one SD card failure away from starting again. Node runs it as a proper managed service in your own tenant, on UK infrastructure, paired with a managed MQTT broker for your devices to report into.
What Home Assistant is
Home Assistant is an open source platform for automating buildings and the equipment in them. It collects state from your devices, presents it on dashboards you build, and runs automations against it: schedules, thresholds, occupancy, energy use, alerts. It has one of the largest integration ecosystems of any open source project, and it is designed so that the logic and the history stay on your own instance rather than in a vendor's cloud account.
Its natural home has always been self-hosting, which is exactly the problem: a self-hosted automation hub that nobody backs up, monitors or patches is fine right up until the day it is not. That is the gap this service fills.
How a hosted instance actually works: MQTT-first
We would rather be honest about the shape of this than sell you a picture that does not match the deployment. An instance running in our data centre has no route onto your local network, so Home Assistant's local discovery (mDNS, SSDP, Zigbee and Bluetooth radios) is not available to it.
What works, and works well, is MQTT. Your devices, or an on-site gateway such as Zigbee2MQTT or an ESPHome bridge, publish to a managed MQTT broker running in your own tenant. Home Assistant subscribes to that broker over your tenant's private network and everything downstream (entities, dashboards, automations, history) behaves exactly as it would locally. The site only ever makes outbound connections, so there is nothing to expose or port-forward.
This is why we host the two together. Cloud-hosted integrations that reach out over the internet work normally as well; it is only local radio discovery that needs something on site.
Where this fits your estate: it suits building and facilities telemetry, energy and environmental monitoring across multiple sites, and any equipment that can be made to speak MQTT. A single home full of Zigbee bulbs and no gateway is not the case this is built for.
Why a managed instance instead of a box in the cupboard or Nabu Casa
It is backed up: the configuration, the history database and every integration credential sit on a dedicated volume in your tenant, covered by the same backup schedule as the rest of your applications. An SD card in a cupboard is not.
It is patched and monitored: Home Assistant releases monthly and moves fast. We keep the platform underneath it current and watch the workload, rather than leaving upgrades to whoever remembers.
It is reachable and identity-gated: a real hostname, a real certificate, and the interface behind your own Keycloak realm, not a port forwarded from a home router or a subscription to somebody else's remote-access tunnel.
Your data stays in the UK: occupancy, energy and sensor history is genuinely revealing data. It stays in your tenant on UK infrastructure under an Article 28 data processing agreement, not in a vendor's cloud.
No per-integration or per-device fees: you pay for the resources the instance runs on, from our published rate card, whatever you connect to it.
How it compares to the commercial smart-building platforms
Home Assistant's own credentials are not in doubt. GitHub's Octoverse 2024 report ranked home-assistant/core the number one public project on GitHub by contributor count, with more than 21,000 contributors, and the project's opt-in analytics recorded 654,861 active installations in July 2026, 36,163 of them in the UK. Since 2024 the code and the trademark have been owned by the Open Home Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, which is a materially different governance position from every commercial platform below, all of which are single-vendor products.
| Commercial smart-home platforms | Home Assistant, managed by Node | |
|---|---|---|
| Who controls the roadmap | A single vendor, which can retire a product or a device tier | Open Home Foundation, a non-profit, with the source under Apache 2.0 |
| Where automation logic runs | Largely vendor cloud; local execution varies by product | Your own instance, in your own tenant |
| Device breadth | The vendor's own ecosystem and its certified partners | Over 1,000 brands supported by the project |
| Subscription | Ongoing per-account fee for the useful tier | No licence fee; you pay for the hosting resources |
| Data | Telemetry and video history held in the vendor's account | Your tenant, UK infrastructure, Article 28 DPA |
| Exit | Automations and history are locked to the platform | Standard formats on a volume you can take with you |
Published prices for the platforms most often compared against it, as of July 2026: Google Home Premium is $10/month or $100/year for Standard and $20/month or $200/year for Advanced; Amazon's Alexa+ was reported at $19.99/month for customers without Prime; Hubitat's C-8 Pro hub is $179.95 with no mandatory subscription. Commercial building-management systems from Crestron, Control4 and the KNX ecosystem are quote-only, dealer-installed and publish no list pricing at all, which is itself the point: you cannot budget against a number nobody will show you.
On Nabu Casa, plainly: Home Assistant Cloud costs £6.50 a month, or £65 a year including VAT in the UK, and that is genuinely cheaper than hosting with us. It is also a different product. Nabu Casa gives remote access and the Google and Alexa bridges for an instance you still own, run, patch and back up yourself, on hardware in your building. We run the instance. If you are happy maintaining a box on site and you want remote access, buy the Home Assistant Cloud subscription: it funds the project, and we would rather tell you that than sell you something you do not need. Our service is for the case where nobody wants to own that box, or where it needs to be backed up, identity-gated and monitored to the same standard as the rest of your estate.
Keycloak and access
Home Assistant has no native single sign-on, so, as with several applications on the platform, we gate it rather than pretend otherwise. The web interface sits behind an authentication proxy tied to your tenant's Keycloak realm: no valid Keycloak session, no dashboard, and MFA and leaver removal are handled centrally at the identity layer. Behind the gate, Home Assistant keeps its own accounts.
The API paths that the mobile app, webhooks and the websocket connection use bypass the proxy, because those clients cannot carry a browser session. They are protected by Home Assistant's own long-lived access tokens, which is the security model Home Assistant is designed around. We would rather you knew that explicitly than found it in a configuration file.
Where it fits with the rest of your stack
The MQTT broker that feeds Home Assistant is a managed application in the same tenant, so device telemetry is available to more than just dashboards. Route events into n8n to raise a ticket or notify a team when a threshold is crossed, stream higher volumes through Apache Kafka, and build reporting over the history with Metabase or Apache Superset. It is all one tenant, one private network and one identity provider.
How Node runs Home Assistant for you
Deployment: we deploy Home Assistant with its own persistent storage, your hostname and TLS, the interface gated by your Keycloak realm, and the connection details for your tenant's MQTT broker ready for the onboarding step.
Upgrades and maintenance: we keep the platform underneath it patched and coordinate application upgrades with you, because an automation hub is not something to upgrade unannounced.
Monitoring and support: the workload is monitored like everything else we run and the volume is backed up on the tenant schedule. Metrics scraping from Home Assistant's own integration into our dashboards is a follow-up we have not shipped yet, and we are not going to claim it before we have.
Your infrastructure or ours: hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, with the same managed service either way.
Beta, stated plainly: Home Assistant is a beta application on our platform, sold MQTT-first for the reasons above. It deploys, it is backed up, it is gated by your identity provider, and we are still right-sizing it against real workloads. Ask us where it stands before you make it load-bearing.
The economics of the cupboard: a self-hosted automation hub looks free until the SD card dies, the certificate expires, the router forwards a port it should not, or the person who built it leaves. A managed instance from Node is a flat, predictable rate-card cost with backups, patching, monitoring and identity-controlled access included, and your automation history staying in your own tenant in the UK. See pricing for how our flat rates work.
Open source provenance
Home Assistant
is
Apache-2.0
software maintained upstream
(source, ref 2026.1.3).
Node provides managed hosting, configuration and support. We are not the publisher.
- Hosting for paying customers: permitted under this licence.
Adoption and community
89.3k+ GitHub stars GitHub's Octoverse 2024 ranked home-assistant/core the number one public project on GitHub by contributor count, with more than 21,000 contributors. The project's own opt-in analytics reported 654,861 active installations in July 2026, 36,163 of them in the United Kingdom; Home Assistant states that fewer than a quarter of users opt in, so the real figure is higher. Since 2024 the code and the brand have been owned by the Open Home Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, rather than by a vendor.
“Just use Home Assistant or openHAB - fully local control by default. I've been using the former for a while now, and it's been working great.”
Hacker News
“Traditional home automation - Crestron et al - is the absolute wild west. Business models are overwhelmingly based around hardware sales, lock in, and customer retention through obfuscation and control.”
Hacker News
“My Midea AC came with a WiFi dongle (for some proprietary cloud/app integration) that I replaced by an ESP32 equivalent for local control through Home Assistant.”
Hacker News
Quotes are from public community discussions, linked to their original sources.
Frequently asked questions
Can a hosted Home Assistant see the devices on our local network?
Not by itself, and we would rather say so up front. An instance running in our data centre has no route onto your LAN, so the local discovery protocols Home Assistant normally relies on (mDNS, SSDP, Zigbee and Bluetooth radios) do not apply. Devices reach a hosted instance by publishing to your own MQTT broker, either directly or through an on-site gateway such as Zigbee2MQTT or an ESPHome bridge. That is the shape this product is built for.
So what do we need on site?
Something that speaks MQTT outbound to your broker. That is usually a small gateway box running Zigbee2MQTT or ESPHome for radio devices, or the devices themselves where they support MQTT natively. Nothing has to accept inbound connections and there are no ports to open: the site connects out to the broker over TLS.
Is this a replacement for a Home Assistant box in the building?
For MQTT and IP-reachable devices, yes, and with the advantages of being backed up, monitored, patched and reachable from anywhere. For an estate that depends on local radio discovery, it complements an on-site gateway rather than removing it. Managed connectivity into customer networks is something we are building; ask us where it has got to before you plan around it.
How do people sign in, and what about the mobile app?
The web interface sits behind our authentication proxy on your tenant's Keycloak realm, so reaching the dashboards requires a valid Keycloak session and whatever MFA your realm enforces. Home Assistant's API surface, which the mobile app, webhooks and the websocket connection use, bypasses that proxy by necessity, because those clients cannot carry a browser session, and is protected by Home Assistant's own long-lived access tokens instead. That split is deliberate and documented; if it is not acceptable for your environment, tell us before you deploy.
Where does our automation data live, and is it backed up?
Inside your own tenant on UK infrastructure. The configuration, the history database and the credentials for every integration live on a dedicated volume in your namespace, covered by the tenant's backup schedule along with everything else we run for you, under an Article 28 data processing agreement.
What state is Home Assistant on the platform in today?
Beta, and MQTT-first. The deployment, storage, backups, the Keycloak-gated interface and the paired MQTT broker are all in place and it is deployable from your portal, but we are still right-sizing it against real workloads and there is no metrics scraping into our dashboards yet. Talk to us before you make it load-bearing for a building.
Talk to us about Home Assistant.
Tell us what you want to automate and what your devices speak, and we will tell you honestly whether a hosted Home Assistant and a managed MQTT broker are the right shape for it.