How I Accidentally Built a Managed OpenClaw Hosting Business

#ai #saas #showdev #startup

Saturday night. Almost eleven. I am on the couch, beer in hand, some show playing in the background. My phone buzzes. Discord. Hey Daniel, my bot stopped responding. Can you take a look?

Sure. I could. Because at this point, I could do this in my sleep.

I had become the unofficial OpenClaw guy in my friend group. The person you call when your AI assistant stops answering. When Docker complains. When the API keys are not right. When some port is blocked and nobody knows why.

After a few weeks of this, I got fed up. And then I thought: I should just make this a proper thing.

So I did. The result is ClawHosters.com. Managed OpenClaw Hosting.

The Problem with OpenClaw Setup

OpenClaw is a fantastic project. Over 145,000 GitHub stars and 20,000 forks speak for themselves. Your own AI assistant, running on your own server, working across Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack. Sounds great. It is great.

But the setup? That is a different story.

I set up OpenClaw for myself first. Then for my friend Alex. Then for his roommate. Then for a coworker. At some point I had helped eight people. And every single time, it was the same issues.

Docker conflicts. Port forwarding. API keys. Firewall rules. Updates that break the whole setup.

Building It

I am a Rails developer. Have been since 2016.

ClawHosters runs on Hetzner Cloud. A customer clicks Create Instance. My system automatically provisions a VPS on Hetzner. The server gets set up, OpenClaw gets deployed, and in less than a minute everything is ready.

The fix was snapshots. I take a fully configured server, create an image from it, and spin up new instances from that image. Everything pre-installed. Now it takes under a minute.