Where to Run Your Hermes Agent
A Hermes agent only does its job while the machine underneath it is awake. That single requirement is what turns "which model should I use" into "where do I put this thing". There are three honest answers, and the right one depends on how much of the maintenance you actually want to own.
The three options, without the sales pitch
Your own machine
Free, if the hardware exists and stays onBest if you are learning, or you already run a home server that never sleeps.
The real cost is that it is now infrastructure. Power cuts, router changes, sleep settings, and operating system updates all become your agent's problem.
A plain VPS you administer
A few euros a month for the machineBest if you are comfortable on a command line and you genuinely do not mind the upkeep.
The honest total adds your time: install, upgrades, SSL renewal, firewall, backups, monitoring, and being on call. Some people enjoy this. If you are one of them, do this.
Managed hosting
From EUR 14.99 a monthBest if you want the agent and not the server, and you would rather someone else be the one who notices at 2am.
Fixed and predictable. The machine is still dedicated and you still get root, but the maintenance list above is ours by default rather than yours.
We sell the third one, so read the first two as what they are: real options that are right for real people. If you want the full money breakdown including the AI provider bill, that lives on the Hermes cost guide.
What is actually under each plan
Every tier is a dedicated VPS in Denmark with NVMe storage. The same hardware and the same prices apply whether you run Hermes Agent or OpenClaw on it, because the machine does not care which one you chose.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe | Bandwidth | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 2 | 4 GB | 15 GB | 2 TB | EUR 14.99 |
| Hobbyist | 4 | 8 GB | 25 GB | 5 TB | EUR 25.99 |
| Pro | 8 | 16 GB | 40 GB | 9 TB | EUR 49.99 |
Annual pricing and the full feature list are on the plans page.
What managed covers, item by item
"Managed" is a word that hides a lot, so here is the list rather than the word.
Provisioning and install
The machine is created, hardened, and has Hermes installed and configured before you ever see it. You do not touch a package manager.
SSL and your own subdomain
A certificate is issued for your dedicated subdomain and renewed automatically. Nobody wakes up to an expired certificate.
Firewall and OS updates
Authentication is on by default rather than opt-in, the firewall is closed by default, and operating system security updates are applied for you.
Snapshots
Regular snapshots of the whole machine, so a bad experiment is a restore rather than a rebuild.
Monitoring
We watch whether your agent is actually answering, not just whether the server pings. Those are different questions and only one of them matters to you.
The 2am problem
When something breaks at an inconvenient hour, it is our job to notice. That is most of what you are buying.
What stays yours
Your API keys, which model you point the agent at, what skills it runs, what it is allowed to touch, and everything it says. We host the machine and keep it healthy. We do not read your agent's conversations and we never resell your model usage.
One thing that is specific to Hermes
Hermes is built around keeping things. It writes skill files, stores outcomes, and carries that forward. All of that lives on disk, and disk that disappears takes the accumulated work with it.
This is the practical argument for a machine that persists rather than a container that gets recycled, and it is why snapshots matter more here than they would for a stateless chatbot. If you are comparing options, ask each one what happens to the agent's files when the process restarts. The answers differ more than the marketing pages suggest.
It is also worth being plain about the limits. A self-improving agent is not magic. It will sometimes conclude it did a good job when it did not, and it can overwrite a change you made by hand. Persistent storage plus snapshots is what turns that from a loss into an inconvenience.
Hermes hosting FAQ
- Can I run Hermes Agent on my own laptop instead?
- You can, and it is a reasonable way to try it. The limit shows up the first time you close the lid. A Hermes agent is built to act on a schedule and message you first, and none of that happens while the machine is asleep, on a different network, or rebooting for updates. A laptop is a fine place to learn Hermes and a poor place to depend on it.
- What size server does a Hermes agent actually need?
- More than people expect, because the agent is not the only process running. Our Starter plan is 2 vCPU and 4 GB of RAM, which is a realistic floor for one agent with room to work. Very small droplets with no swap are the most common cause of an agent that dies silently and cannot explain why: the kernel kills the largest process it can find, and that is usually the agent.
- Is the server shared with other customers?
- No. Every plan is a dedicated VPS provisioned for you alone, in a Danish data centre inside the EU. Nothing is multi-tenant, so your agent is not competing for CPU with a stranger's workload and your data is not sitting in a shared database.
- Do I get root access?
- Yes, SSH access is available and free on every plan. Managed here means we do the work by default, not that we lock you out of your own machine. If you want to go in and change something, it is your server.
- What does managed actually cover?
- Provisioning the machine, installing and configuring Hermes, issuing and renewing SSL, firewall rules, operating system security updates, snapshots, and monitoring that tells us when your agent stops responding. The line is simple: infrastructure is ours, what your agent does and says is yours.
- How long does it take to go live?
- Typically seven to ten minutes from payment to a running agent you can message. That is the measured range on our own deployments, not a marketing number, and it includes provisioning the server, installing Hermes, and issuing the certificate for your subdomain.
- Can I move my existing Hermes setup over?
- Usually yes, and it is worth asking before you rebuild anything. What transfers cleanly is your configuration, your skills folder, and your memory files. What does not transfer is anything tied to the old machine's address, so channel connections normally need re-pairing once on the new server.
Keep exploring
- Managed Hermes Agent hostingThe product itself, what it does, and how fast it goes live.
- Hermes Agent cost guideThe full monthly picture including the AI provider bill we never see.
- Connect Hermes to TelegramGetting your agent into a chat app you already have open.
- Plans and pricingTier comparison, annual pricing, and what every plan includes.