$cd ../guides/The $6/mo AI Brain:
Cloud VPSBudget Tier~15 min setup
The $6/mo AI Brain:
Hetzner CPX11 VPS Guide
/** A 24/7 cloud agent that costs less than a fast food meal. */
// Why a Budget VPS?
A cheap Linux VPS combined with a small model (4-bit Llama 3 8B) works perfectly for Telegram/WhatsApp replies, daily feed summarization, and web scraping. No $1000 GPU required.
β¬3.79
Monthly Cost
// CPX11 instance
2 GB
Dedicated RAM
// Needs Swap setup
4.5 t/s
Llama 8B Speed
// CPU-only inference
99.9%
Uptime
// No power cuts
1_procurement.sh
1. Spin up the Hetzner Server
- Create a Hetzner Cloud account.
- Create a new project and select New Server.
- Location: Choose the datacenter closest to you.
- Image: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
- Type: Shared vCPU, CPX11 (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB Disk).
- Add your SSH keys, then click Create.
2_memory_swap.sh
2. Critical: Create Swap Space
2GB of RAM is not enough to load a 4GB+ LLM. We MUST create a swap file.
# Create a 6GB swap file
fallocate -l 6G /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile && mkswap /swapfile && swapon /swapfile
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | tee -a /etc/fstab
3_install_openclaw.sh
3. Deploy OpenClaw via Docker
Use Docker Compose to spin up OpenClaw and Ollama completely CPU-bound.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openclaw/openclaw/main/docker-compose.cpu.yml
docker-compose -f docker-compose.cpu.yml up -d
config.yaml
CPU Optimization Secrets
ai:
model: "llama3.1:8b"
num_threads: 2
num_ctx: 4096
timeout_ms: 120000