news.ycombinator.com• Feb 23, 2026• 1 min read
Managed OpenClaw hosting, 60-second provisioningI registered https://clawhosters.com 18 days ago. Wrote the first line of code that same day. The whole thing is live now with paying customers, so I figured it was time to share it here.The problem: deploying OpenClaw (the open-source AI agent framework) is annoying. Docker setup, Nginx config, SSL, firewall rules, Playwright browser installation for web tools, messenger bridge configuration. If you know what you're doing, it probably takes an hour. I got it down to 30-60 seconds.*The provisioning trick: prewarmed VPS*Snapshot-based provisioning alone gets you to about 3 minutes. Hetzner needs ~40s to create the VPS from a snapshot alone.The thing that actually makes it fast is prewarming. I keep 1-2 idle VPS per tier sitting ready. They're already booted from the snapshot, Docker is running, everything is warm. When a customer clicks "Create Instance," I claim a prewarmed server, SSH in, upload configs, start containers. 30-60 seconds, done.A background job monitors the pool and repl