If you’ve been exploring self-hosted AI agents lately, two names keep coming up: Hermes Agent and OpenClaw.

At first glance, they seem similar. Both can run on your own machine or server. Both are designed to stay available beyond a single chat session. Both aim to become more useful than a normal chatbot.

When I first heard about OpenClaw, I thought it was just another AI tool you run locally. After using it for a while, I realized it’s much more stable when deployed on a VPS — especially if you want 24/7 uptime, remote access, and long-running AI tasks.

In this article, I’ll walk through how I personally installed OpenClaw on a VPS, what resources you really need (not theoretical specs), and which VPS providers worked best for me after testing.