Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well and staying safe. I'm totally blind running voiceover on macOS. I am considering experimenting with the AI assistant called OpenClaw. Ideally, I want to run it on a virtual private server. managing it through a web interface that I connect to with my Mac. Does anybody have any recommendations on resources to get started with this, guides or any advice for me? I'm a complete beginner here and have no idea what I'm doing. Ideally, I'd want to install an AI model from Ollama on my VPS and have OpenClaw use that for its work and tasks.
Any hints, tips, or guidance would be most welcome. I do not want to run OpenClaw on my own system, or on any old hardware. And this is not a path that I will entertain going down.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, everyone, and I look forward to your helpful responses. :)
Comments
Hosting
Google is your friend. Looks like lots of hosts. Although to chat to it with iMessage I think you'd have an easier time running it on your mac. I realize you said you don't want too, but for the most cost effective consider a docker container or two, one for Ollama, one for your agent. Then you could try more than one. Also don't know how strong your Mac is, but you may want to consider reversing the setup, Openclaw/other agent local, and use a LLM from a provider so you can get some performance.
Re: Hosting
I have googled this of course, but I wanted to get opinions from an accessibility perspective. So, just to be clear, you're saying run OpenClaw on my Mac, but the LLMs run on my VPS. Do you know of any VPS providers which are good in terms of accessibility? question mark.
LLM
An LLM takes lots of power. I'd not run it on a VPS, I was meaning more like using OpenRouter which gives you the choice of hundreds of models, some fairly cheap. As for VPS hosting, I use LiNode for basic Linux hosting, their control panel has been usable (although I've not logged in to it in a bit so hopefully it's not changed.) Granted running OpenClaw in a VPS will give you a lot tighter security at least against local files, but I think chatting to it from iMessage will be hard. Of course you can use other arrangements like Telegram, its web interface. I set up OpenClaw once when it was fairly new and could not figure out what to do with it. SO a lot has probably changed.