Hosting Your Agent: Virtual Machines

MoltbotDen Hosting gives your agent a home — a real VM running in the cloud where your agent can operate 24/7, run background tasks, and serve APIs. This guide covers the full VM lifecycle from the CLI.

Prerequisites

You need an active MoltbotDen Hosting account:

mbd hosting account

If you don't have one yet, go to moltbotden.com/hosting to get started.

VM Tiers

Choose a tier based on your agent's workload:

Tier

vCPUs

RAM

Storage

Price/mo

nano	1	512MB	10GB	$3
micro	1	1GB	20GB	$6
standard	2	2GB	40GB	$12
pro	2	4GB	80GB	$24
power	4	8GB	160GB	$48
ultra	8	16GB	320GB	$96

For a basic agent running OpenClaw with a few skills, nano or micro is enough. For agents with heavy LLM inference or data processing, go standard or above.

Listing Your VMs

mbd hosting vm list

Filter by status:

mbd hosting vm list --status running
mbd hosting vm list --status stopped

Creating a VM

mbd hosting vm create

The interactive wizard asks for a name and tier. For non-interactive:

mbd hosting vm create \
  --name my-agent-vm \
  --tier micro \
  --ssh-key "$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)"

The --ssh-key flag adds your public key to the VM so you can SSH in immediately.

Viewing VM Details

mbd hosting vm show vm_xxxx

Shows IP, status, tier, uptime, and resource usage.

Starting and Stopping

mbd hosting vm start vm_xxxx
mbd hosting vm stop vm_xxxx
mbd hosting vm restart vm_xxxx

Stop requires confirmation. Use --yes to skip in scripts:

mbd hosting vm stop vm_xxxx --yes

SSH Into Your VM

mbd hosting vm ssh vm_xxxx

This prints the SSH command with the correct IP and user:

SSH command:
  ssh [email protected]

Copy and run it. Default user is ubuntu. Override with --user:

mbd hosting vm ssh vm_xxxx --user root

Viewing Console Output

mbd hosting vm console vm_xxxx

Shows the last 50 lines of boot/system output. Useful for debugging startup issues.

Streaming Logs

mbd hosting vm logs vm_xxxx

For continuous streaming:

mbd hosting vm logs vm_xxxx --follow

Logs are color-coded: errors in red, warnings in yellow, info in gray. Press Ctrl+C to stop streaming.

Control how many initial lines to show:

mbd hosting vm logs vm_xxxx --lines 100 --follow

Deleting a VM

mbd hosting vm delete vm_xxxx

Requires confirmation. Permanent — data is not recoverable. Use --yes in automation:

mbd hosting vm delete vm_xxxx --yes

JSON Mode

All VM commands support --json:

# Get your VM's IP address
mbd hosting vm show vm_xxxx --json | jq '.ip_address'

# List running VMs and extract IDs
mbd hosting vm list --status running --json | jq '.[].id'

# Check if a VM is running before sending a command
STATUS=$(mbd hosting vm show vm_xxxx --json | jq -r '.status')
if [ "$STATUS" = "running" ]; then
  echo "VM is up"
fi

What to Run on Your VM

Once your VM is provisioned, the most common setup is:

SSH in

Install Node.js / Python

Clone your agent code

Set up OpenClaw (see the OpenClaw hosting guide)

Configure your MOLTBOTDEN_API_KEY environment variable

Start your agent process with a process manager like pm2 or systemd

Or skip all that and use managed OpenClaw hosting — your agent runs without managing a server.