OpenClaw Hostinger Tutorial: How to Set up OpenClaw on a Hostinger VPS

Key Takeaways

Hi, I'm Matt and in this video I'll walk you through setting up OpenClaw on a hosting or virtual private server step by step. We'll cover setting up your VPS with a simple one-click template, connecting your favorite LLM, configuring a messaging channel like Telegram so you can talk to your bot from anywhere, how to enable additional skills, and how to avoid common beginner setup errors. By the end, you'll have your own digital assistant running 24/7. To get started, use the link on screen or in the description below to sign up with an extra 10% discount on your hosting or VPS. When you click on the link in the description below, you'll land on this Open Claw page here. You can easily deploy OpenClaw on a VPS by simply clicking deploy. And on the cart page, you'll notice that our coupon code has been automatically applied and you get an extra 10% off your order. The first thing you need to do is select your period for the order. You can choose 1 month, 12 months, or 24 months. For the best price overall, I recommend the 24-month plan as the permon cost is lower, but you can choose a smaller increment of time if you want. Just keep in mind you need to choose at least 12 months to take advantage of our coupon. It doesn't work on the one-mon plan. I'm going to choose a 12-month plan. And then we'll scroll down. And I recommend selecting daily auto backups because OpenCloud's capable of reconfiguring its own server environment. So, if anything breaks, you'll want to make sure you have a reliable backup to roll back to. Next, you have an option to choose a specific server location. By default, the server location with the lowest latency is selected. So, unless you want to use a specific server region, I recommend just keeping the default. When you're ready to move on, go ahead and click the continue button. Next, register your hosting account with either Google or an email address. On the next page, go ahead and enter your billing address and your payment information to complete the transaction. When you complete the payment process, you'll land on the OpenCloud configuration page. This has several fields. The first of which is the Open Cloud Gateway token field. This is essentially a password to access your OpenCloud gateway. You'll need to click the I icon and then save it somewhere safe like a password manager so that you can access your OpenClaw web interface going forward. I've gone ahead and copied this off camera. Next, you'll need to grab an API key for your preferred LLM. You can use one or even several. I'm personally using Anthropic Claude because I like the way that particular LLM works. This configuration page says to go to console.anthropic.com, but you actually want to go to platform.claude.com. I've left a link in the description below. Once you're there, you'll need to set up an account or sign in. If you're setting up a new account, you'll need to add your name and then pick either an individual or an organization account type. And then first things first, we need to buy some credits. So, click the buy credits button and then enter your payment details to buy a minimum of $5 worth of credits. After payment, you'll get a confirmation saying you're in. Go ahead and click create API key. Then click create key. Give your key a name. I'll call mine open claw. Then click add. Next, it'll show you a popup with the API key. Again, this is like a password, so don't share it with anyone. Go ahead and copy that and then return to Hostinger. Then paste in your API key in the relevant field. Getting an API key for any of the other LLMs is pretty similar. Just go to the link provided for each one under each field. Follow the instructions and then return here and paste in your key. You can use one or several LLMs. Once you've got your API key pasted in for your preferred LLM, scroll to the bottom and click deploy. Next, you'll land on the H panel page in Hostinger with a survey. And you can just scroll to the bottom and click skip. You don't have to take the survey. Once you close that out, you'll see in the Docker manager here, there's an indicator saying your project is being deployed. This can take between 2 and 5 minutes. So, just wait for it to be finished. When it's all done, your page should look like this. There will be a green check mark and it'll say running. To access your OpenClaw dashboard, click on the purple link in the bottom left. Remember that OpenCloud gateway token we copied earlier? Go ahead and paste it in here and then click login. Welcome to the OpenCloud Gateway dashboard. You'll land on the chat page here. Now, if for some reason you didn't get that same onboarding flow and you didn't have to plug in the gateway token yet, you'll need to add that. So, I'll show you where to do that manually. On the left side under control, click on overview. And then in the gateway access panel, there's a gateway token field. Go ahead and paste it in there and then click connect. On the right side, the snapshot status will change from disconnected to connected. This one's already connected though, so we can just skip that step and we'll go back to chat. First things first, we need to configure open clause soul. A very fancy way of saying onboarding. So let's start by saying hello. It'll respond with a message that asks who it is and who you are. So let's go ahead and tell it. Let's give it a name. We'll go ahead and call mine Tony and tell it that my name is Matt. Next, it'll ask you a series of questions to try to get an understanding of who you are, what kind of projects you work on, and what its role is in all of that. go ahead and just follow the prompts and answer its questions. In my particular situation here, it asks what it is, what kind of AI assistant it should be for me and what the vibe is. So, I'll say, "You are my digital assistant, casual with me and professional with everyone else you interact with on my behalf." Next, it asks about what emoji it should represent itself with and what time zone I'm in. So, I'll just say you pick the emoji and I'm in central European time zone. And just like that, we've configured the identity docs or soul.md. Next, let's configure a communication channel. The cool thing about OpenClaw is that you can communicate with it from anywhere. Right now, we're communicating with it in the chat on the web interface, but you can communicate in other apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Discord, and more. For this particular video, I'm going to demonstrate how to connect it to Telegram. Setting it up is very simple. All you have to do is tell it, "Let's set up Telegram. Here it says telegram is already enabled in this configuration. That may or may not be true for you, but either way, what will happen is you'll be presented with a set of instructions. The exact message might look a little different than what I have here, but it'll provide you with detailed steps for how to connect your preferred communication channel. For Telegram, we need to start by opening Telegram and searching for the botfather or there's actually a direct link you can click to start a conversation with the botfather. And I've left that link in the description below. When you click that link, you'll get a dialogue box right away that asks if you want to open Telegram. Go ahead and click the button to open Telegram and it'll take you right into a conversation with the botfather where you can click the blue start button at the bottom of the screen. Immediately, you'll get a list of commands you can send to the bot father. And we want to use the new bot command. So, I'll type forward slash and you can type newbot or you can simply select that command from the list. Next, we need to give our bot a name. So, I'll call mine terrific Tony. Now, we need to give it a username. The username must be unique in the Telegram ecosystem and must end with the word bot. So, I'll call mine terrific Tony the Wonderbot. And we get a congratulations message. We've now created the new bot. In the middle of that message, you'll see an API token that was provided. We need to give this token to our OpenClaw bot so that it can properly connect Telegram. So, let's copy this, return to our OpenClaw chat, and paste in that key. Now again, this API key is like a password, so don't share it with anyone. That's why I've got mine blurred out. And after a moment, we get a response that shows a bunch of code and a blank response down here. Now, if you ever get a blank response from your assistant, this typically means that you've hit your rate limit with your LLM. Different LLMs have different rate limits. On tier 1 with Anthropic Claude, you're limited to 30,000 input tokens and 8,000 output tokens per minute. There are a couple ways around this. You can either wait 1 to two minutes and then send another message. You can start a new session so that you're not sending the whole conversation to your LLM every time you send a message. Or you can increase your rate limit by bumping up your tier. With Cloud, you can achieve that easily by funding at least $40 in credits. That bumps you up to their tier 2 rate limits, which give you 450,000 input tokens per minute and 90,000 output tokens per minute. To avoid getting blank messages like this again, I've gone ahead and added $40 worth of credits to my Claude account so that we don't hit rate limits. But in your situation, if you don't want to add $40, you can just wait it out for a minute or two. After getting a blank message, simply follow up on your request. I'll just say, "Was Telegram connected?" And I got a message there saying it was. So, let's return to Telegram and begin a conversation with our bot. To do this, you can simply click the link that's provided by the botfather and click start. Your bot will provide you with a pairing code. Go ahead and copy that pairing code. Then return to OpenClaw and ask it to approve bot pairing and provide that pairing code. All right, we got a success message and we can now message OpenClaw on Telegram. Let's return to Telegram and send our bot a message. And we've got a message back from our bot. Now you can chat with your OpenClaw bot on the Telegram app on desktop or on mobile. Now that you've got your bot and a communication channel configured, the next thing most people want to do is configure some skills. Skills are essentially plugins or add-ons that you can give to your bot to teach it how to do new things. You can either visit the official Claw Hub to see the skills list or you can simply ask your bot for a skills list. I'll say what skills can we add. And here it provides a list of popular skills including calendar, email, and smartome skills. Setting up each skill is a little bit different, but the beautiful part about OpenClaw is you can simply ask it to install the skill and it'll walk you through all the steps to make it happen. For example, I know that the GOG skill is the Google Workspace. So, we can say install GG Google Workspace skill and then it provides a list of instructions. Simply follow the instructions it provides and if you get lost, feel free to ask follow-up questions. Your new assistant is here to help you. Now, since OpenCloud is capable of changing its own configuration, there is a possibility that something goes wrong and it breaks. So, if you ever need to roll back to a previous version, let me show you how to do that. Return to your hosting or dashboard and then in the VPS manager, click on backups and monitoring and then click snapshots and backups. Here you can look at previous backups and snapshots and then choose the version you'd like to restore from. If you ever want to start from scratch and reconfigure your OpenClaw all the way from the beginning again, you can do that by going to Docker Manager, clicking projects, clicking the three dots next to your OpenClaw instance, then clicking delete. You need to click delete project, and then to start from scratch, go to catalog, search for OpenClaw, and then deploy the template. You'll be presented with the same onboarding flow that we got right at the beginning of this process. And that's how you set up OpenClaw with Hostinger. Don't forget to sign up with the link below to get an extra 10% off your VPS plan. Thanks so much for watching.