Secure OpenClaw in 5 Minutes: What You Get with ClawTrust

OpenClaw has over 150,000 GitHub stars and 25,000+ forks. It is the fastest-growing open-source AI agent framework in the world. Everyone wants to run it. Almost nobody secures it properly.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Self-hosting OpenClaw means: provision a VPS, install Docker, configure environment variables, set up your messaging channels, and then spend another 4 to 20 hours hardening it. Most people skip that last part.

That is how we ended up with 42,665 exposed instances. No authentication. No encryption. Gateway wide open to the public internet. Scannable by Shodan in hours.

Every other hosting provider solves the first problem: deployment speed. Nobody solves the second one: security.

Until now.

What You Get in 5 Minutes

Here is what happens when you click "Get Started" on ClawTrust.

1. Pick your plan. Starter ($79/mo), Pro ($159/mo), or Enterprise ($299/mo). All-inclusive: dedicated VPS, AI credits, and full security stack. No hidden costs. No surprise API bills.
2. Name your agent. Give it a name. Pick a role template: customer support, sales, DevOps, content, or general. Pro and Enterprise agents get their own professional email address.
3. We provision everything. This is where ClawTrust is fundamentally different. While you wait (under 5 minutes), the platform:
   • Spins up a dedicated VPS. Not shared. Not a container on someone else's machine. Yours.
   • Applies LUKS2 full-disk encryption from first boot. Agent state, logs, conversation history: all encrypted at rest.
   • Binds the gateway to loopback only. Zero public ports. Nothing to scan. Nothing to exploit.
   • Establishes an outbound-only encrypted tunnel. Your server reaches the internet. The internet cannot reach your server.
   • Deploys Docker containers with privilege restrictions and resource caps. No container breakouts. No runaway processes.
   • Enables token authentication with a cryptographically random key. No default passwords. No "auth: none" configurations.
   • Configures health monitoring that checks your agent every 15 minutes. If something breaks, we know before you do.
   • Sets AI budget controls via OpenRouter. Your agent pauses gracefully at the limit. No $3,600 surprise bills.
4. Connect your channels. Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, email (Pro+). One click each. All channels available on every tier.
5. Start chatting. Your agent is live. Hardened. Monitored. Ready to work.

Total time: under 5 minutes. Total security layers: 7. Total public ports: zero.

What Other Hosting Providers Skip

Most OpenClaw hosting gives you a running instance. Here is what they leave out:

• No disk encryption. Your agent's data sits in plaintext. Conversation logs, credentials, everything.
• Public gateway port. Scannable by Shodan within hours of deployment. 42,665 instances found this way.
• No credential isolation. API keys live on the same machine as the agent. One compromise exposes everything.
• No health monitoring. You find out something broke when a customer complains. Or when you check manually. Days later.
• No AI budget controls. One runaway loop, one recursive tool call, and you are looking at hundreds or thousands of dollars in API charges.

We do not leave any of that out.

The Security Stack

Seven layers. All automatic. All included in every plan.

• Gateway: Loopback only. Zero inbound ports. Not reachable from the public internet.
• Auth: Token-based. Cryptographically generated. No default credentials.
• Network: Outbound-only encrypted tunnel. Nothing for an attacker to scan or probe.
• Containers: Privilege-restricted. Resource-capped. Browser automation sandboxed.
• Disk: LUKS2 full-disk encryption from first boot. Everything encrypted at rest.
• Credentials: Encrypted vault on separate infrastructure. Your agent never sees your passwords or API keys directly.
• Monitoring: Health checks every 15 minutes. Auto-remediation for known issues. You get alerted, not surprised.

This is the same hardening process described in our complete security hardening guide. The difference: we do it automatically in minutes instead of you doing it manually over hours.

Speed and Security Are Not a Tradeoff

The industry has framed this as a choice. Fast deployment or secure deployment. Pick one.

That framing is wrong.

Security is slow when humans do it manually. When it is automated into the provisioning pipeline, it adds seconds, not hours. Every ClawTrust agent ships with the same hardening that would take an experienced admin 4 to 8 hours to apply by hand.

You should not have to choose between "my agent is running" and "my agent is safe." Both should be the default. On ClawTrust, they are.

Who This Is For

If you are technical and want full control, self-hosting is a perfectly valid choice. We even wrote the setup guide and the hardening guide to help you do it right.

If you want to skip the infrastructure work and get straight to building with your agent, ClawTrust handles everything. No Linux administration. No Docker debugging. No firewall rules. No patching schedule. Just a secure, monitored agent that is ready to work in under 5 minutes.

If you are an agency running agents for multiple clients, each ClawTrust agent is fully isolated on its own VPS. No shared resources. No cross-contamination. One compromise cannot spread.

Get Started

OpenClaw is incredible software. But running it securely should not be a second job.

ClawTrust handles the infrastructure, the hardening, and the monitoring. You handle what your agent actually does.

Get Started See the Security Architecture

Chris DiYanni is the founder of ClawTrust. Previously at Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, and PagerDuty. He builds security infrastructure so businesses can trust their AI agents with real work.