[OpenClaw VPS Guide] How to Deploy OpenClaw On xCloud | Get Your AI Agent Live in 5 Minutes

I want to show you how to set up OpenClaw on xCloud hosting. But before I get started, I want to point out that it is much, much easier to do than on any other host I've seen. This is only going to take a few minutes and it's going to be working great at the end. And you don't have to be a coder. Let's get started. The first thing we're going to do is create a server. So I'm going to click new server. And for OpenClaw, it has to be on xCloud's managed hosting rather than one of these others. So we're going to click that and we're going to give it a name and then choose an app type. And down at the bottom is OpenClaw. Tags are optional. I'm going to skip that. My server type is general. I'm choosing the smallest available server size. I live nearish Chicago, so I'm going to choose that. Then there's my server. Then for web server, we're choosing Agentic and OpenClaw. And then there's this little thing here that you should read because it's important. OpenClaw is a hobby project. It's still in beta, etc. Read that. It's important. So I click that I have read and then we can connect optionally a provider and optionally Telegram. So for my provider, I'm going to choose OpenAI ChatGPT OAuth. You can choose any one of them you wish, but ChatGPT 5.5 is particularly cool because it does not require an additional API and it does not incur additional costs. Claude does, um, several others do. So if you have a paid account with ChatGPT already, you're not going to pay extra to do this as well. So we're going to choose that. Then we need, uh, an API auth token, and you click this link right here to generate token, and it opens up a new tab. Now this is a little bit of a cycle, but it's not that hard. You click Connect with OpenAI and I'm already logged in, so I'm going to choose that. If not, you would just log in. Then this is similar to signing into something with Google or X or Facebook or something. You click Continue and this will look like it failed because it's going to localhost, but you copy this URL You go back to this window and you paste it right here and click this exchange code and show token. And there's our token. So we copy, come back to here and paste there. Now in a sec, we'll be connected with ChatGPT, but now we also want to connect with Telegram. Now this is not required. There's an excellent web-based UI for OpenClaw that you could use. Telegram allows you to do it easily on your phone or use Telegram tools like scheduling things, etc. So we're going to do that. You don't have to. So we need a Telegram bot token. So I'm going to go to Telegram and I've added a user called Bot Father. And I'm gonna click start and it tells you all the stuff you can do, but what we want is /newbot and you have to pick a name. There are two names you're gonna give. One is like a user handle, it could be anything you want, SuperDwarf, whatever. The second one has to end with the word bot and is more for backend use. I like to call them the same thing because I'm just a nerd that way. So I'm going to call it X10 TofuBot. And here's the username. And there we are. We have a new bot just like that. Now we want to copy this token and you can simply click it. And it copies it. So we come back here and we paste. Now we need to put in my Telegram user ID, not the bot's. So I'm going to go to IDBot, click start, and the first thing it does is tell me all about myself. And right there is my ID. So I copy that and paste it here. So now my user ID will have permission to communicate with the bot. So, uh, the cost is $28.80 a month for this setup. So I'm going to click pay and deploy. I mentioned earlier there are no additional fees if you use ChatGPT. I meant specifically there are no additional ChatGPT fees. You do have to pay for your server at xCloud. Now this is creating a new server and it says 10 to 15 minutes. In my experience, it's about 7. So I let my dog out or whatever. All right. Now our OpenClaw server is set up. There are a couple of things that we need to do. One is to go back to Telegram, choose Botfather, And you'll note that there is a link right here, and we're going to start a conversation with our bot. So we're going to click start, and you'll see up here it says typing. Now, the first time you do this, it could fail. It might not be able to negotiate with a server yet. And so you can try a couple of times. It says, it still says it's typing. I'm going to let it run here for a sec. And there we are. Now we're talking with OpenClaw, and this is the setup system for it. Who am I? Who are you? Etc. This is literally like talking to a person. So you can say, "Toss out some options." So there's some options for how you might want your OpenClaw to behave. I'm going to say, "I am Topher," and you can see we what it's doing. I'm not going to pick one of those. I'm going to say, you are Jasper, you are a WordPress developer, because that's what I am, and I'm going to probably use that for this. You also like television shows, and I'm going to show you why in a few minutes. Now, something important here is you can see what files it's editing. You can log into your server with SSH and edit those files manually. I don't recommend it, but it's your server. You can do it. And now OpenClaw is set up. I'm going to show you a couple more things and then I'm going to show you some things you can do with Telegram. So on the server, there's all the normal stuff like security, your domain. Monitoring is impressive. You can go to events. There's the installation stuff, installing OpenClaw, SSL. Et cetera. When I was preparing for this video, I struggled a little getting Telegram set up and I used OpenClaw to fix that. I said to OpenClaw, hey, I'm having trouble with Telegram. What's up? And it said, oh, this is what's wrong. Would you like me to fix it? And I said, yes. And I could come in here to the events monitoring area and watch it fix things. It was very, very useful. Uh, but we're going to go to the OpenClaw menu. I'm going to start at Status, and here is our gateway status. Uh, this restart and stop is not for your server, it's for OpenClaw. Then this is for the control UI, so this is the web interface to your OpenClaw instance, and I'm going to show you that in a minute. You can turn that off and make this completely headless and use Telegram only. And it's important to note, you can use other things besides Telegram. You can use Signal or whatever. Telegram has the most functionality with OpenClaw, but it is not secure. It's not encrypted. So if security is important to you, you should probably use Signal. I'm going to look at providers here, and this would be other AIs that you're connected to. You don't have to connect to anything. You don't have to use ChatGPT. OpenClaw is an AI assistant, but it is kind of limited. Um, OpenAI or Claude or any of the others are much more powerful. Uh, so OpenClaw can do things for you on its own, and then when you need to, it can leverage ChatGPT. So here's where you can change your AI provider and your connection tokens, et cetera. Now if we go to channels, this is where our Telegram setup is. And right here it will tell you how to set up Telegram. So if you skipped this at the beginning and you come in here, these are the instructions on what to put in your bot token and your user ID. Then we go to config. And here's your openclaw.json file. If you don't really know what you're doing, I don't recommend messing with this, but if you do, it's here. More power to ya. Then we have environment, and this is your.env file. If you're already familiar with OpenClaw, then you probably know what to do with this. If you're not, again, I don't recommend messing with this. We go to updates and it shows you what your current installed version is. You can check for updates and you can update OpenClaw as new versions come out. Then there's reset. If you need to start over, uh, you can wipe out all of OpenClaw and start over. It's a lot of work. In my preparation for this, I actually chose to delete servers and start over. It was super easy, but if you need to keep the server you have, here's where you can reset OpenClaw. And then there are excellent logs. This is everything that's going on, and again, it's a little technical, uh, but if you are interested in that, it's there. So the rest of what's here is standard xCloud hosting stuff, so I'm not going to go into that. We already have videos for that. So I'm going to go back to OpenClaw Status and I'm going to copy the control UI URL. And the username is always admin. The password is always unique, of course. So I'm going to hit copy. And put that in here. And you have a ton of tools here on the left. You can do basically everything you need to with OpenClaw, but the default tab is chat. And so it knows it's Jasper. This is basically exactly the same as what you get in Telegram. So you can type it here or you can type it here. So if you don't want to use Telegram, if you don't want to use any external tool, you can completely use this and it'll be just fine. So there, that, that option is there for you. You can go to your overview of OpenClaw and keep in mind this is not your server. This is only OpenClaw. Then channels, instances, sessions, just all kinds of stuff. So I mentioned that I was gonna tell you what you can do, why I chose TV shows. There's a TV show I really like that I'm working on for a project. It's called "Still Standing." And so you can say things like, so in the TV show "Still Standing," Johnny Harris interviews people in small towns. I wanna know who those people are and I want it in CSV so I can import it into Google Docs. So it's going to get that. And now keep in mind, if you connected OpenClaw to your Google Docs account, it could actually create the spreadsheet for you. So this is looking good. I know the first episode is in Bamfield, British Columbia, and it looks like it's getting names. And there we are processing those names with Python. And there we have CSV of that particular actor. Now there were other people in that episode, and so obviously I need to refine my request, but it did find the right episode, the right town, and gave me CSV all within Telegram. So that means you can use it on your phone or your tablet, your laptop computer like I'm using right here right now, or anything you wish. If you're comfortable with using something like Telegram, I do recommend turning off this UI. It'll use fewer system resources, etc., and it becomes more like talking with a person in Telegram. And you create— I don't want to say relationship because it makes it sound like it's a real person, but your OpenClaw instance learns from what you're doing, and that's very useful. So if you're going to use OpenClaw, xCloud is a great option because it's so easy to set up and tear down and set up another one. It's, it's really, really simple. So I hope you have good luck with it.