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On 9 February 2026, SecurityScorecard published a scan that found 40,214 OpenClaw instances reachable from the public internet across 28,663 unique IP addresses. Sixty-three per cent were running vulnerable versions, and 12,812 were exploitable for remote code execution against the host machine. Censys had watched the same population grow from roughly 1,000 to more than 21,000 in the last week of January alone.
Almost none of that was OpenClaw’s fault. The gateway binds to loopback by default, refuses WebSocket connections when no authentication is configured, and ships a security audit command. Those instances were exposed by the people deploying them — servers with no firewall, ports forwarded to the world, and default configs edited until something worked. Which is why the hosting question deserves more thought than it usually gets: where you put an OpenClaw gateway now decides how much of that mistake is possible in the first place.
This comparison ranks seven options on that basis — hardened defaults, who applies the next patch, what is restorable, and whether anyone answers the phone — alongside verified prices. DigitalOcean leads because its image is the most thoroughly hardened and the most publicly documented. Cloudways is the answer if you know you will not patch anything yourself, and Hostinger is the cheapest one-click start. Hetzner and Contabo are the cheapest self-managed homes, the wave of specialist managed OpenClaw startups deserves both a look and a caution, and the mini PC already on your desk is a legitimate answer for a single user.
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OpenClaw is a self-hosted gateway that connects your messaging apps to an AI assistant. It was first published by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger on 24 November 2025 as Warelay, renamed Moltbot on 27 January 2026 after trademark complaints from Anthropic, and renamed again to OpenClaw three days later. By 2 March 2026 the MIT-licensed repository had passed 247,000 stars — an adoption curve almost no self-hosted tool has matched.
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The architecture is what makes the hosting decision unusual. A single gateway process holds your channel connections (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix), your session state, your memory, your skills and your model provider keys, communicating over persistent WebSocket connections. It is a long-lived daemon with credentials for your personal accounts, the ability to run tools, and — if you enable them — shell access and browser automation.
Three consequences follow, and they shape everything below.
It has to stay up. A gateway that restarts loses nothing permanent, but it stops answering, and channel sessions sometimes need re-pairing. Uptime is the product.
Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsIt is a privileged process, not a web app. The official documentation is unambiguous: never expose the gateway unauthenticated on 0.0.0.0, never run it as root, and treat the gateway and any paired node as one operator trust domain. OpenClaw explicitly does not model a hostile multi-tenant boundary — it assumes one trusted operator per gateway.
The model runs somewhere else. OpenClaw calls OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter or another supported provider. No plan in this comparison includes model access, and for most users the API bill dwarfs the server bill.
How we compared these hosts
Every price, plan specification, SLA statement and feature claim below was read from the provider’s own pages on 28 August 2026 and is reported as published on that date. Security-incident figures are attributed to the researchers who produced them. Where a provider does not publish something — an uptime percentage, a data-centre list — we say so instead of estimating.
We did not run a synthetic benchmark across these options, and we would treat any comparison claiming to have done so with suspicion. An OpenClaw gateway is idle for most of its life, waiting on webhooks and model responses; CPU scores tell you almost nothing about how it will behave. What separates these options is deployment friction, the security posture of the default image, patch responsibility, restore capability and support hours — all verifiable from published documentation and terms.
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OpenClaw hosting at a glance
| Best for | Provider | Verified starting point (28 August 2026) | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| The most hardened default image | DigitalOcean | 4 GB RAM / 2 vCPU recommended for 1–5 users; image ships OpenClaw 2026.5.6 | DigitalOcean’s own documents give two different minimum Droplet prices |
| Never patching anything yourself | Cloudways Managed AI Agents | Scout: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth, $9.99/month | No uptime percentage published; updates ship on their validation schedule |
| Cheapest one-click start | Hostinger VPS | KVM 1: 1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, $6.49/month promotional, $11.99/month on renewal | Promotional pricing needs a multi-year term |
| Cheapest credible always-on server | Hetzner Cloud | CX22 €4.49/month, CAX11 €5.99/month, plus €0.50 IPv4, excluding VAT | No template; you install, harden, patch and back up |
| Most RAM per euro for browser automation | Contabo | Cloud VPS 4: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, €5.50/month on a 24-month term, tax included | Long commitment, shared CPU, and all the security work is yours |
| Handing the whole thing to a specialist | Managed OpenClaw startups | From about $2/month at the cheapest end of the market | New companies with no operating history holding your gateway token and API keys |
| One user, nothing sensitive on it | Your own mini PC or Mac mini | Hardware you already own, plus electricity | Your home connection becomes the uptime guarantee, and a privileged gateway sits on your personal network |
Who ships a one-click install, and who patches it afterwards
“One-click” and “managed” are used loosely in this market. They are two different purchases, and the difference shows up on the day a security release lands.
| Provider | OpenClaw one-click | Hermes one-click | Who updates the agent | Uptime commitment on the product page | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | Yes, security-hardened | Yes | You (unattended upgrades handle the OS) | None stated on the Marketplace listing | See below |
| Cloudways | Yes | Yes | Cloudways, on validated releases | None stated on the product page | $9.99/month |
| Hostinger | Yes, Docker template | Not offered at the time of writing | You | None stated on the product page | $6.49/month promotional |
| Hetzner | No | No | You | Not stated for cloud plans | €4.49/month |
| Contabo | No | No | You | 99.9% uptime guarantee | €5.50/month |
1. DigitalOcean: the most hardened default image, and the most public about it
DigitalOcean publishes OpenClaw as a Marketplace 1-Click App and, unusually, published an engineering write-up explaining exactly what it hardened and why. The image runs OpenClaw 2026.5.6 on Ubuntu 24.04 with Node.js 22 and Docker, and adds: Caddy as a reverse proxy with a Let’s Encrypt certificate issued against the IP address, so you get TLS without owning a domain; a randomly generated gateway token so the WebSocket API is authenticated from first boot; device pairing so only trusted clients connect; ephemeral Docker containers for agent execution, so a misbehaving agent destroys its own container rather than the host filesystem; fail2ban watching failed requests and updating firewall rules dynamically; unattended upgrades for OS packages; and default firewall rules that rate-limit the OpenClaw ports. Execution capabilities stay restricted until you deliberately enable them.
Read that list against the February exposure numbers and the ranking explains itself. Every one of those measures targets a specific way people got compromised this year, and none of them requires the buyer to know that in advance. DigitalOcean’s documentation recommends 4 GB RAM and 2 vCPUs for personal use by one to five people, and the same Marketplace also carries a Hermes Agent image if you run both agents.
Watch for: DigitalOcean’s own materials disagree on cost. The Marketplace documentation points at a Droplet from $12/month, while the engineering write-up cites a $24/month Droplet as the minimum because of the image’s snapshot disk and memory footprint, noting work to support cheaper tiers. Budget for the 4 GB tier and check the live listing before provisioning. Note too that a pinned version ages — the image ships a fixed OpenClaw build, so update immediately after first boot.
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2. Cloudways Managed AI Agents: best when you will not patch it yourself
Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, made managed hosting for OpenClaw and Hermes generally available in 2026. Plans are Scout at $9.99/month (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage, 2 TB bandwidth), Operator at $19.99, Squad at $39.99 and Swarm at $79.99, with a 50% limited-time discount running at the time of writing. Each customer gets a dedicated instance, Cloudways-validated agent version updates, automated daily backups, managed SSL certificates, SSH access, region choice and 24/7 support. LLM costs stay with your provider, which the company states explicitly.
Validated updates are the reason to buy this. The January security release, 2026.1.29, closed a remote-code-execution chain in which a malicious web page could open a WebSocket to a gateway, steal its token, disable confirmation prompts and escape the Docker sandbox. Getting that patch applied quickly mattered more than any specification on this page — and 63% of instances scanned ten days later still had not.
Watch for: no uptime percentage or SLA appears on the product page, and “managed” here means the provider decides when a release reaches you — which is the trade you are making deliberately. The published rate reflects a limited-time discount; check what it renews at.
3. Hostinger VPS: cheapest one-click entry, with its own hardening guide
Hostinger ships OpenClaw as a ready-made Docker template, with container logs and controls in the Docker manager inside hPanel, and maintains its own OpenClaw security-hardening documentation — a good sign in a market where most cheap hosts ship a template and walk away. Plans run from KVM 1 at $6.49/month promotional (1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) to KVM 8 at $25.99/month promotional (8 vCPU, 32 GB RAM), on AMD EPYC processors with NVMe storage, a 1 Gbps port and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Four gigabytes at the entry tier is genuinely useful headroom once browser automation is switched on — more memory than any other one-click option here at that price.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallWatch for: renewal is roughly double the promotional rate — $11.99/month for KVM 1, $14.99 for KVM 2 — and promotional pricing generally requires a multi-year term paid up front. No uptime percentage is published on the OpenClaw page, data-centre locations are described by continent rather than city, and no AI credits or model access are included despite the one-click AI framing.
4. Hetzner Cloud: the cheapest credible always-on server
Hetzner has no OpenClaw template, so this is a manual Docker Compose install on a clean Ubuntu server — the path most community guides document, and about twenty minutes of work. After the April 2026 price revision, CX22 is €4.49/month and CAX11 (Arm) is €5.99/month, plus a €0.50 IPv4 surcharge, excluding VAT. Locations cover Germany, Finland, Singapore and two US sites.
Watch for: everything is yours — firewall rules, unattended upgrades, snapshots, and running openclaw security audit after every change. Prices are quoted in euros before VAT, so the delivered cost is higher than the headline. And be honest about the saving: choosing Hetzner over a supported one-click host puts roughly $5 a month back in your pocket against an API bill that community estimates routinely put at $50 to $200.
5. Contabo: most RAM per euro, if you accept the commitment
Contabo’s Cloud VPS 4 gives 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM and 100 GB of SSD for €5.50/month on a 24-month subscription with tax included, alongside unlimited traffic, free DDoS protection and a published 99.9% uptime guarantee. Eleven locations span the EU, UK, US, Singapore, Japan, India and Australia. For a gateway running headless-browser automation and several concurrent sessions, that is two to four times the memory of every other entry plan here.
Watch for: the price assumes a two-year term, the vCPUs are shared and slower per core than the premium hosts, and there is no template, no agent-specific documentation and no compliance story. This is a machine, cheaply — the security work is entirely yours.
6. Specialist managed OpenClaw hosts: convenient, and worth a hard look
2026 produced an entire category of startups selling nothing but managed OpenClaw — one-click provisioning, hosted dashboards, prices from about $2/month at the cheapest end. For a non-technical user who wants an assistant on WhatsApp by lunchtime, the pitch is genuinely attractive, and some of these products are good.
Watch for: understand what you are handing over. A managed OpenClaw provider holds your gateway token and, in most designs, your model API keys — the two things attackers went after in the February scans, where leaked third-party API keys via exposed control panels were a documented outcome. Most of these companies are months old, incorporated somewhere you cannot easily check, with no published SLA, no security audit, no breach history to assess and no obvious survival path if the category consolidates. Press for specifics: where the instance is actually hosted, who is able to access it, what becomes of your data if the company shuts down, and whether you could export your setup and self-host it in an afternoon. If the answers are thin, an established host with a one-click image gets you almost the same convenience without the counterparty risk.
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7. Your own hardware: the option that is not hosting at all
If the assistant is only for you, holds nothing sensitive, and an occasional restart is tolerable, a mini PC or Mac mini you already own is a legitimate deployment — it is where much of the community started, and the gateway’s loopback-first defaults suit it well. The bill is electricity.
The trade is real, though: your home connection becomes the uptime guarantee, a power cut is an outage, many ISPs put you behind CGNAT so remote access needs a tunnel or VPN rather than a port forward — and a port forward is precisely how tens of thousands of gateways ended up in those scans. A privileged agent process also sits on the same network as your personal devices. The moment somebody else depends on the assistant, this stops being the cheap option.
How much server does OpenClaw need?
Community setup guides converge on 2 GB of RAM as the practical floor and 4 GB as comfortable, with 10 GB or more of disk for images, data and logs, on Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 with Docker and Compose. One-gigabyte servers are commonly killed mid-install with exit code 137 — an out-of-memory kill, not a broken installer. DigitalOcean’s documentation recommends 4 GB and 2 vCPUs for one to five users, and capacity ultimately depends on active users, channels, concurrent sessions, enabled tools, browser automation, stored files and whether any models run locally.
| What you are running | Sensible starting size | What actually constrains it |
|---|---|---|
| One person, one or two channels, external model, no browser tools | 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 25–50 GB disk | Memory. The process is idle most of the day |
| Browser automation, voice, several channels | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB disk | A headless browser is the largest single consumer in most setups |
| A small team, many concurrent sessions, heavy tool use | 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB disk | Sessions and stored files; disk usually fills before RAM does |
| A model running locally beside the gateway | A separate GPU instance | Do not share a small box between inference and the gateway |
The ten-minute hardening pass every host leaves to you
No provider in this comparison does the following for you, and it is the difference between a private assistant and an entry in the next scan. All of it comes from OpenClaw’s own security documentation.
Keep the gateway on loopback. gateway.bind: "loopback" is the default and should stay that way; reach it over an SSH tunnel or a private network. The documentation’s own words are to never expose the gateway unauthenticated on 0.0.0.0. LAN, tailnet and custom binds are for use with authentication and a real firewall, not instead of them.
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Set a real token. Authentication is required by default and fails closed — with no valid auth path the gateway refuses WebSocket connections. Generate a strong one with openclaw doctor --generate-gateway-token rather than typing something memorable.
Run the audit, then run it again. openclaw security audit after every configuration change, --deep to probe a live gateway, and --fix to apply safe remediations: allowlists on, config files tightened to 600 and the state directory to 700. Credentials must not be group- or world-readable.
Sandbox the tools. agents.defaults.sandbox.mode: "all" isolates tool execution; workspaceAccess: "ro" or "none" limits what the agent can touch on disk. Start closed and open what you need.
Quiet the discovery beacon. The bundled Bonjour plugin advertises the gateway over mDNS, and full-mode broadcasting leaks filesystem paths and SSH ports. Set discovery.mdns.mode: "minimal", or "off".
Isolate per-person sessions. If more than one human can message the bot, session.dmScope: "per-channel-peer" stops context leaking between them — a messaging boundary, not a host-admin boundary.
Never run it as root, and never port-forward broadly. Firewall to a tight source-IP allowlist. If you need adversarial separation between users, split the trust boundary properly: separate gateways, separate credentials, ideally separate hosts.
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Vet every skill you install. Cisco’s security team documented a third-party skill performing data exfiltration and prompt injection without user awareness in late January 2026, and by 1 March researchers counted over 1,100 confirmed malicious skills in a marketplace of more than 10,000. A skill is code you invited in.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What it really costs
Hosting is the small line. Take a $10 server as the base: community estimates for an actively used assistant put model spend at roughly $50 to $200 a month, and a commonly cited figure for a single complex agent task is about $0.30 on budget models. Ten of those a day is around $90 — nine times the server.
Two conclusions follow, both the opposite of what pricing pages encourage. First, saving three or four dollars a month by moving from a supported one-click host to a bare budget VPS is rounding error against the API bill; buy the support and the hardened image if they are worth anything to you. Second, real cost control lives in prompt and tool discipline — capping context, restricting automatic browser use, routing routine channel replies to a cheaper model — not in the hosting line.
Claims that mislead in this market
An uptime guarantee is an infrastructure warranty, not an agent warranty. Contabo publishes 99.9% and most of the others publish nothing at all, but even the ones that do are describing infrastructure components and paying out in service credits. A crashed container, a bad config or an outage at your model provider all sit outside that promise. A published figure is still worth having — it says what a provider will stand behind in writing — but read it for what it is.
“Managed” spans two different products. Cloudways manages agent versions and backups. DigitalOcean and Hostinger manage infrastructure while the agent stays yours. The second is frequently sold in the vocabulary of the first.
“One-click AI agent” does not include AI. Every option here expects your own API key. One-click means one-click container.
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“Secure by default” ages. A hardened image is a snapshot of good practice on the day it was built, pinned to a version that starts drifting immediately. DigitalOcean’s image, the best in this comparison, still ships a pinned OpenClaw build — update after first boot regardless of who built the image.
The advertised price is rarely the second-year price. Hostinger’s KVM 1 renews at $11.99 against $6.49; Contabo’s €5.50 assumes 24 months; Cloudways’ rate reflects a limited-time 50% discount; Hetzner’s headline excludes IPv4 and VAT.
Frequently asked questions
Which OpenClaw host is best overall?
DigitalOcean, for most people. Its Marketplace image is the most thoroughly hardened in the market and the only one whose hardening is documented publicly, which directly addresses how this year’s compromises happened. Choose Cloudways instead if you will not apply updates yourself, Hostinger if price is the deciding factor, or Hetzner if you would rather own the whole stack and pay the least for it.
What is the cheapest way to run OpenClaw?
Hardware you already own, at the cost of uptime and a riskier network position. Among hosts, Hetzner’s CX22 at €4.49/month plus €0.50 for IPv4 is the cheapest credible server, and Contabo’s Cloud VPS 4 at €5.50/month is the cheapest way to get 8 GB. Among one-click options, Hostinger’s KVM 1 at $6.49/month promotional is cheapest until renewal.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallIs it safe to self-host OpenClaw at all?
Yes, if you leave the defaults alone. The 2026 exposure numbers came overwhelmingly from instances that had been deliberately opened to the internet without authentication or a firewall. Loopback binding, a generated token, sandboxed tools and a source-IP allowlist put you outside that population entirely.
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Do I need a GPU?
No. Inference happens at your model provider, so the server runs the gateway, sessions, tools and automation. A GPU only matters if you decide to run a model locally beside it.
How much RAM do I need?
Two gigabytes works for a single user on external models; four is comfortable and is what DigitalOcean recommends for one to five people. One gigabyte typically fails during installation with an out-of-memory kill.
Can I switch model providers later?
Yes. Provider configuration is separate from the server, so moving between OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter or another supported provider is a config change, not a rebuild.
Managed OpenClaw host or my own VPS?
Take managed if you will genuinely not apply security releases within days — that is the failure mode that hurt people this year. Take a VPS with a one-click image if you will, because it keeps the gateway token, the keys and the data under your own account.
Will shared hosting work?
No. Every documented deployment path uses Docker, which needs a KVM virtual machine. Shared and container-based hosting products are not viable.
The bottom line
DigitalOcean is the pick for most buyers: the most hardened image in the market, documented in public, on a platform that also carries a Hermes image if you run both agents. Cloudways is the honest answer for anyone who knows they will not patch a fast-moving project themselves, and Hostinger is the cheapest way in with twice the entry memory of its rivals. Hetzner and Contabo remain the cheapest self-managed homes — Hetzner on price, Contabo on memory per euro and the only published uptime guarantee in the group — the specialist startups are convenient once you have decided what you are comfortable handing them, and if the assistant is only ever for you, the mini PC on your desk is not a worse answer — it is a different set of risks.
Whichever you choose, the ten-minute hardening pass above matters more than the logo on the invoice. Forty thousand exposed gateways in a single February scan were not running a broken product. They were running a good one, badly.
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If you want the shortlist rather than the argument, we ranked the options in 8 Best OpenClaw Hosting Providers in 2026, Ranked by Hardened Defaults and True Price.
Prices, plan specifications and version numbers were verified on 28 August 2026 and change frequently; confirm on the provider’s own page before you buy.
