Introducing OpenClaw on DigitalOcean: One-Click Deploy, Security-hardened, Production-Ready Agentic AI

By DigitalOcean and Anantha Ramachandran

Updated: February 10, 2026
5 min read

Note: OpenClaw is formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot

We’re excited to announce 1-Click deployment for OpenClaw on DigitalOcean Droplet® servers, now starting at just $12/month, making it faster and more affordable than ever to run always-on, agentic AI in a security-hardened cloud environment.

OpenClaw’s rapid adoption is a powerful example of developer-led innovation. Built and maintained by Peter Steinberger and a growing open-source community, OpenClaw shows how quickly individual builders are pushing agentic AI forward. As usage has surged, one thing has become clear: building agents is only half the challenge—running them safely, continuously, and predictably is the hard part.

DigitalOcean is designed for what happens when agents move from experimentation into systems at scale that require production inference, secure operation, and cloud infrastructure that scales with real usage.

As OpenClaw moved from experimentation to continuous use, three challenges surfaced quickly: securing agent access, isolating agent execution from the rest of the system, and protecting credentials while keeping deployments simple. The DigitalOcean 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw was built specifically to address these problems, packaging production-grade defaults into a deployment that still feels fast and developer-controlled.

With DigitalOcean’s 1-Click provisioning on Droplet® servers, developers can run OpenClaw in a cloud environment with strong security and operational defaults applied automatically while still enabling all the best features of how OpenClaw works and how developers build.

This experience is part of DigitalOcean’s broader Agentic Inference Cloud:a full-stack cloud platform built to run inference-heavy workloads reliably in production. The 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw provides a fast on-ramp, running on infrastructure purpose-built for continuous inference, predictable performance, and usage-based economics as agent workloads scale.

From local agents to always-on systems

OpenClaw is designed to be local-first and developer-controlled. That flexibility is a major strength, but once agents begin interacting with APIs, tools, and shared environments, new questions naturally emerge:

How do you isolate an agent that can execute tools and commands?
How do you secure access without adding friction?
How do you keep an agent running reliably over time?

Running OpenClaw on DigitalOcean provides a cloud-based setup with a stable, internet-accessible environment that includes a static IP address, predictable networking, and the ability to vertically scale resources as agents grow more active. This makes it practical to run agents continuously, without relying on laptops, local hardware, or ad-hoc tunneling.

As agents stay active longer and handle more requests, inference stops being an occasional API call and becomes a sustained production workload, which is exactly the mode DigitalOcean’s Inference Cloud is built to support.

The 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw is designed to support the transition from local experimentation to production use, without re-architecting workflows or introducing unnecessary complexity.

One-Click Deploy: Safe Defaults, Built for Production

To deliver OpenClaw safely at scale, we focused on three design questions:

How do we ensure requests are authenticated and auditable by default?
How do we isolate agentic code that can execute tools and commands?
How do we reduce exposure to common internet-level attacks without manual configuration?

The DigitalOcean 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw answers these questions out of the box.

With a single click, DigitalOcean provisions a hardened Droplet and installs OpenClaw with production-grade security natively configured.

Key capabilities include:

Container-based isolation: OpenClaw runs inside a dedicated Docker container, isolating agent execution from the host system. If an agent crashes or misbehaves, only its container is affected, which protects the underlying Droplet, files, and credentials.
Authentication by default: Each deployment generates a unique gateway token for authenticated access, ensuring only authorized clients can communicate with the agent. This prevents unauthenticated access and reduces the risk of exposed endpoints.
Hardened server configuration: The Droplet is provisioned with firewall rules, non-root execution, and locked-down permissions to reduce attack surface from day one. Background internet noise is automatically mitigated using fail2ban, blocking abusive traffic patterns without manual tuning.
Private access controls: Device pairing is enabled by default, ensuring that only explicitly approved users and clients can interact with the agent, which limits the blast radius of unintended commands.
Flexible model support: Developers can use DigitalOcean Gradient® AI models directly, connect to open-source models or third-party providers while maintaining full control over runtime behavior, data flow, and configuration. Today, Anthropic is supported with more to follow.

All external access to the 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw is routed through a TLS-secured reverse proxy, ensuring encrypted communication and an auditable access path, without exposing internal services directly. The result is a safer, production-ready baseline that developers own and control, without needing to manually assemble or maintain it themselves.

Get Started in Minutes

The 1-Click Deploy OpenClaw is designed for developers who want:

Security without loss of control
An always-on agent in a cloud environment
Predictable, cloud-hosted operation instead of fragile local setups

This makes it an ideal starting point for real-world agent use cases, and DigitalOcean a natural home as those agents grow into inference-heavy systems that demand reliability, security, and predictable costs at scale.

Latest updates

February 11, 2026: Enhanced stability and affordability

We’ve pushed several updates to the OpenClaw image to improve the day-to-day developer experience:

Improved Affordability: OpenClaw is now accessible on our $12/month Droplet tier, perfect for developers testing agent capabilities.
Streamlined Maintenance: Keeping your instance current is now a single-step process via the /opt/update-openclaw.sh script.
Performance & Security: This update includes security hardening and a move to npm for better dependency management, alongside an improved setup wizard for easier API integration.

More updates coming soon!

Not sure where to start? Check out these resources:

Note: To maintain the most robust security, OpenClaw should only be run within the Droplet environment alongside the security controls that are provided in that environment. Developers deploying OpenClaw or any portion of the code manually outside the Droplet 1-click setting should take additional precautions, as that will alter the security protections of the OpenClaw deployment and may not meet your security requirements otherwise.