OpenClaw, running on your own server

Your first session, from a fresh server

You have deployed the image and the server exists. This is exactly what to do next, in order, with nothing left for you to guess.

1. Log in over SSH using the key or password you set at checkout, the same as you would for any KryoHost VPS.
2. Confirm the image installed correctly by reading /etc/kryohost-image, which records the OpenClaw version and upstream commit it shipped with.
3. Open an SSH tunnel to the admin interface, which listens on localhost only, one forwarding command, the exact syntax is in your welcome email and the knowledgebase article for this image.
4. Add your model provider's API credentials in the runtime's config, or point it at a local inference server if you are running one on the same box or another.
5. Send a small first task through the interface, something like "summarise this page" rather than a large multi-step job, to confirm the model connection works before you build anything on top of it.
6. Widen scope from there. Larger tasks are a matter of clearer instructions once the connection is confirmed working, not additional setup.

None of this repeats between sessions, it is a one-time setup per server. Restarting the runtime after a config change or a plan resize is a single documented command over the same SSH connection.

Why run an agent runtime yourself

Self-hosting an agent runtime is more work than using a managed service, and it is worth being clear about when that trade is actually favourable rather than merely appealing.

Data residency is the strongest case. If you have a regulatory or contractual obligation about where data is processed, running the orchestration layer in a region you selected (and being able to demonstrate it) is often the difference between a project proceeding and not. Our EU regions make this straightforward to evidence.

Cost predictability is the second. Managed agent platforms typically price per seat, per run or per token, which is fine until a workflow starts firing more often than you modelled. A VPS costs the same whether it handles ten runs a day or ten thousand, up to its capacity. For high-volume, low-complexity automation this frequently inverts the economics entirely.

Control over the stack is the third. You pin versions, you decide when to upgrade, you add tools the managed platform does not expose, and nobody deprecates a feature you built a workflow around. Against that: you are now responsible for patching, monitoring and recovery.

When a managed service is simply better

If your volume is low, your data is not sensitive, and you have no operational appetite, a managed platform will cost less in total once you price your own time honestly. Self-hosting an agent that runs twice a week to save forty dollars a month is not a good trade. We would rather say this than sell you a server you will resent maintaining.

Security, backups and disaster recovery

Most sites are not compromised by a determined attacker studying them for weeks. They are compromised by automated scanners walking the entire IPv4 space, trying known plugin vulnerabilities and credential lists against everything that answers on port 443. Defence against that reality is layered and mostly boring, which is exactly why it works, and why it should already be switched on when your deployment is delivered rather than sold as an upsell after the incident.

What runs by default

• Web application firewall: ModSecurity with continuously updated OWASP and vendor rule sets, tuned per stack to keep false positives low.
• Malware scanning: Imunify360 scans on write and on schedule, quarantines known-bad files and can auto-clean common injections.
• Brute-force protection: progressive rate limiting and automatic IP throttling on login endpoints, SSH and mail services.
• DDoS mitigation: always-on L3/L4 scrubbing at the network edge, with L7 protection available on request.
• Account isolation: CageFS confines each account to its own virtualised filesystem, so one compromised neighbour cannot read another's data.
• Free TLS: automatically issued and renewed certificates with modern cipher suites and HSTS available in one click.
• Patched kernels: KernelCare applies security patches without reboots, removing the trade-off between staying current and staying up.

Backups, and what they actually cover

Website files on every deployment are backed up twice a week, with email accounts backed up on a separate schedule so both are protected without either job blocking the other. You can also generate and download a full account backup at any time from cPanel, and our support team can help with a restore if you need one.

A twice-weekly schedule is not the same as continuous protection, and we would rather you knew that than assumed otherwise. If you publish or sell something several times a day, keep your own more frequent backup for the hours between our scheduled runs, particularly for a database that changes constantly, such as an order table.

Compliance-wise, our infrastructure supports GDPR data-residency requirements through EU-only regions, and we sign Data Processing Agreements on request. For workloads touching payment data, our environment is PCI-DSS ready, you still own the compliance of your own application, but the platform underneath will not be the reason an assessment fails.

The infrastructure behind KryoHost OpenClaw

Every conversation about self-hosted OpenClaw eventually comes back to hardware, and for good reason. You can tune a stack endlessly, but you cannot compensate in software for a disk that is queueing, a CPU that is oversubscribed four times over, or an upstream carrier that routes your visitors halfway around the planet before delivering the first byte. KryoHost builds from the metal upward precisely because the metal sets the ceiling on everything above it.

Our the OpenClaw image fleet runs on dual-socket AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable nodes with ECC memory, paired exclusively with enterprise NVMe drives in RAID-10. There is no SATA tier hiding behind the marketing copy, and no "NVMe-accelerated" wording that quietly means a small cache in front of spinning disks. NVMe changes the character of a server rather than simply making it faster: random read latency drops from milliseconds to microseconds, so the database queries that dominate page-generation time on self-hosted AI agents, inference endpoints and automation stop being the bottleneck. In our own benchmarks, moving an unchanged WordPress install from a SATA SSD node to an NVMe node cut median time-to-first-byte by 38% without a single line of code being touched.

Capacity planning is the unglamorous half of the story. We cap node density well below what the hardware could theoretically carry and we alarm on sustained CPU steal, disk queue depth and memory pressure rather than waiting for customers to open tickets. When a node crosses its threshold, new provisioning stops on that node and workloads are rebalanced. That is why the phrase "the server was fine, your site is just heavy" is one you will not hear from our team, if steal time is climbing, that is our problem to solve, not yours to absorb.

Network, peering and routing

KryoHost operates across Tier-III and Tier-IV facilities in 47 customer-selectable countries. Each core site is multi-homed across at least three Tier-1 carriers and connected to the dominant regional internet exchange, so traffic reaches your visitors through the shortest sensible path rather than the cheapest available one. Blended transit is convenient for a provider and mediocre for a customer; direct peering costs more and is the reason a visitor in Frankfurt does not have their packets tour Europe before they see your homepage.

• Redundant power: N+1 UPS with diesel generators tested under load monthly, not merely started and logged.
• Redundant cooling: hot/cold aisle containment with N+1 CRAC units and independent chilled-water loops.
• Redundant network: no single upstream carries more than 40% of a site's traffic, so losing one is a re-route, not an outage.
• Physical security: biometric access control, mantraps, 24/7 on-site security and 90-day CCTV retention.
• Independent audit: facilities hold SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification, with reports available to enterprise customers under NDA.

The practical effect of all this is measurable rather than decorative. Our published 99.99% uptime SLA is backed by service credits, and our public status page records every incident, including the ones that lasted four minutes and that nobody noticed. A provider that only publishes its good quarters is not publishing anything useful.

Performance, Core Web Vitals and what actually moves rankings

Search engines have been explicit that page experience is a ranking input, and Core Web Vitals are the measurable part of that signal. What gets lost in most self-hosted OpenClaw marketing is which of those metrics hosting can genuinely influence. Being precise about it saves you money, because it tells you when to buy a bigger deployment and when to fix your front end instead.

Read that table honestly and a useful rule emerges: hosting owns the first 200–400 milliseconds and your front end owns most of what follows. That is not an argument for cheap hosting (those first milliseconds are a floor that nothing downstream can undo) but it is an argument against believing a plan upgrade will rescue a page carrying eleven tracking scripts and a 4 MB uncompressed hero image.

The caching layers we ship enabled

KryoHost the OpenClaw image ships with a caching stack that is configured on day one rather than left as an exercise. Requests are answered at the shallowest layer that can serve them correctly, and each layer that handles a request is one your origin never sees.

1. Edge CDN: 120+ points of presence serve static assets from the PoP nearest your visitor, typically within 10–30 ms.
2. Full-page cache: LiteSpeed Cache stores rendered HTML in RAM, so repeat visits skip PHP and the database entirely.
3. Object cache: Redis keeps expensive query results and transients in memory instead of round-tripping to MySQL.
4. OPcache: compiled PHP bytecode is held in memory, removing parse and compile cost from every request.
5. Browser cache: long-lived immutable headers on fingerprinted assets mean returning visitors re-download almost nothing.

Compression and protocol choices are handled at the edge too. Brotli is preferred over gzip where the client supports it, HTTP/3 with QUIC is enabled by default so lossy mobile networks stop paying the TCP head-of-line penalty, and TLS 1.3 removes a full round trip from the handshake. None of these require a support ticket; they are the default configuration on every deployment.

Support that answers the question you actually asked

Support is where hosting companies quietly differ most, and where the difference is hardest to evaluate before you buy. Every provider claims 24/7 availability. Far fewer will tell you who is on the other end at 03:00 on a Sunday, how many tickets that person is holding, or what percentage get resolved without being escalated into a queue you cannot see.

KryoHost staffs Linux system administrators across three timezones. There is no offshore first line whose job is to send you a knowledgebase link and close the ticket. Our commitment is a first response inside < 15 min on anything service-affecting, escalating automatically to on-call if that is missed. When something does need a second pair of hands it moves to a named senior engineer and you are told who owns it, not dropped into a silent queue.

What is included, and what is genuinely out of scope

Being clear about scope up front prevents the most common support frustration: discovering after an incident that the thing you assumed was covered never was.

Support reaches you through live chat, tickets and email, and (on business and VPS plans) a scheduled screen-share call when something genuinely needs a live conversation. The same standard of engineer answers at any hour, which matters more than it sounds when you are describing an intermittent fault under pressure at two in the morning.

How to choose the right OpenClaw plan

Buying hosting badly usually happens in one of two directions. Either you buy the cheapest thing available, hit its ceiling within a quarter and migrate under pressure; or you buy three tiers above what you need and pay for headroom that sits idle for years. Both are avoidable with about ten minutes of honest arithmetic.

Start from traffic, not from storage

Storage is the number hosting companies advertise because it is cheap to give away and easy to compare. It is almost never the constraint. A well-built content site with a few hundred posts occupies under 2 GB. What actually determines whether you outgrow a deployment is concurrency, how many requests need generating simultaneously at your busiest minute, not your busiest month.

Take your peak day, look at the busiest hour, and assume the busiest minute carries roughly three times the average minute in that hour. If that number is under about 60 dynamic requests, entry the OpenClaw image is genuinely sufficient. Between 60 and 300, you want guaranteed CPU. Above that, you want a VPS or a container-isolated business plan where noisy neighbours cannot reach you at all.

Read the renewal price before you read the headline price

The introductory rate on a self-hosted OpenClaw plan is a customer-acquisition cost, not a price. What you will actually pay is the renewal figure, multiplied by however many years you keep the site. We publish both on every plan card on this page for exactly that reason. A $19.99 entry price that renews at four times the rate is not cheap hosting; it is a loan against your future attention.

Compare on total cost over three years, including domain renewal, SSL if it is not free, backups if they are billed separately, and any migration fee at the point you eventually leave. That last one matters: a host that charges to let you go has told you something about its confidence in the product.

OpenClaw terminology, decoded

Hosting vocabulary is unusually good at making simple ideas sound complicated, and occasionally at making limited products sound generous. Here is what the terms on a self-hosted OpenClaw comparison page actually mean in practice.

If a provider will not define its soft limits in writing, treat that as the answer. Ours are published in the Terms of Use, in plain language, with the numbers included.

Billing, guarantees and cancellation

Billing should be the least interesting part of your relationship with a hosting provider. It becomes interesting only when a provider uses it as a retention mechanism, automatic multi-year renewals, cancellation flows hidden behind three menus, refunds that require a phone call during business hours in a timezone you do not live in. We have deliberately built ours to be dull.

• Cancel from the panel: one button in your client area. No ticket, no phone call, no "let me transfer you to retentions".
• Pro-rata credit on upgrades: move up mid-cycle and the unused portion of your current term is credited automatically.
• Renewal reminders: 30, 14 and 3 days before any charge, with the exact amount stated in the email.
• No hidden setup fees: the price on the plan card is the price at checkout, before tax.
• Free data export: a full account archive on request at any time, including after cancellation, for 30 days.

We accept cards, PayPal, bank transfer and major cryptocurrencies. Invoices are issued with full tax details for business accounts, and annual billing carries a genuine discount rather than a discount against an inflated monthly rate.

On the SLA: 99.99% availability is measured monthly at the network edge, excluding scheduled maintenance announced at least 72 hours in advance. Fall below it and you receive service credits automatically, you do not have to notice, calculate and claim. An SLA that requires the customer to police it is not much of a commitment.