A VPS or Cloud Server

If you want the agent there at 3 a.m., reachable from anywhere and taking webhooks from GitHub, you need a machine that never sleeps. A rented virtual private server, or VPS, is the most common home for an OpenClaw setup that people rely on every day.

The rule

A VPS rents you uptime and reachability; you pay monthly and lock it down.

Why a VPS

• Always online, so cron jobs and heartbeats fire on time.
• Reachable from anywhere, including webhooks from outside services.
• Separate from your personal computer, so if something goes wrong, the damage stays on a machine that holds nothing else of yours.
• A good fit for a personal assistant, for team automation, and for anything that needs to run continuously.

Why not

• A bill every month.
• The hardware is not yours.
• Running local models through Ollama needs plenty of memory and processing power. Renting a server that big is expensive, so a VPS usually pairs with a hosted model provider.

Picking a provider. OpenClaw needs a server that can run Node.js, so almost any VPS works and you are not locked in. The official docs include setup guides for several providers, among them DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Render, Fly.io, Google Cloud, Azure and exe.dev. Compare them on three things:

• price for the size of server you need;
• region: a data centre close to you makes replies feel quicker;
• ease of setup: an official guide saves an evening.

Securing a machine on the internet. A VPS is exposed to the whole world, so the checklist matters even more. Keep the Gateway bound to localhost and reach it privately, through Tailscale (a private network between your own devices) or an SSH tunnel, instead of opening its port. When something public, such as a webhook, must reach in, expose only that through a reverse proxy. Set a strong auth token before exposing anything, run OpenClaw as a normal user, and run openclaw security audit --deep after every config change.

The shortcut

Confirm the need, check the model plan, pick the provider, lock it down, in that order. Each step can change the next.

Drills

Answer fast — trust the rule.

Remember

• A VPS rents you uptime and reachability; you pay monthly and lock it down.
• Any Node.js host works: compare price, region and ease of setup.
• Trap: exposing the Gateway on 0.0.0.0. Keep it on localhost and use Tailscale, an SSH tunnel or a reverse proxy.