OpenClaw hosting: Hetzner vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr

When self-hosting OpenClaw, your biggest decision after committing to self-hosting is choosing where the server actually lives.

While ClawKickstart offers a guided, automated path for Hetzner, you can use a server you already own from any provider. Let's look at how Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and Vultr compare for running OpenClaw.

• Hetzner: Unbeatable price-to-performance, great for European or US data centers.
• DigitalOcean: Predictable, ubiquitous, and deeply familiar to most developers.
• Vultr: Huge global footprint with data centers in almost every major region.

Hetzner is often the default choice for self-hosting because their pricing is incredibly aggressive. You get significantly more CPU cores and RAM for the same price compared to the big American cloud providers. This is why ClawKickstart built its first automated provisioning integration specifically for Hetzner.

DigitalOcean "Droplets" are the industry standard for a clean, reliable VPS. While more expensive than Hetzner byte-for-byte, their dashboard is excellent, their documentation is legendary, and many teams already have existing infrastructure there.

Vultr sits somewhere in the middle. They offer aggressive pricing on high-performance compute instances and have data centers in locations where Hetzner and DigitalOcean might not, such as Sydney, Tokyo, or São Paulo.

Ultimately, OpenClaw is just software running on a Linux box. Whether you provision a new Hetzner server through our dashboard, or provide the IP and SSH details of a droplet you spun up on DigitalOcean, the end result is the same: a powerful AI agent running on your own infrastructure.