Hermes Agent Setup on VPS

VPS is the cleanest 24/7 home for a Hermes agent — four steps, no local machine footprint.

## Pick a cheap VPS first The creator buys a 4 GB / $3 per month plan from a provider he calls "the zebra ones" (Zebura), filtering by price and going standard. For a pure executive-assistant workload, 2 GB at $2/mo is enough. Heavy builds (games, big projects) need 8 GB or 16 GB. He flags that every "free VPS" he has seen eventually demands a credit card and charges once the trial ends, so he treats them as paid plans.

## SSH in with Termius, not bare terminal From the Zebura dashboard he grabs the IP address, SSH username (Ubuntu), and SSH password. He uses Termius instead of raw terminal specifically because Termius ships an SFTP pane that shows every file on the VPS. New host → IP → label → Ubuntu → password, and the session is live.

## Run the installer — and patch the two fresh-VPS gotchas He pastes the install command straight from the Hermes docs. If it fails on a brand-new box, run sudo apt update first, because the installer only requires git and curl and many minimal images ship without them. When the prompt says OpenClaw installation detected. Would you like to import from OpenClaw?, he says no for greenfield installs. He warns that the import path he tried elsewhere was "quite troublesome" and dropped the cron jobs, so he now runs a manual migration he says is "99% fixed" — to be covered in a separate video.

## Wire a model and skip chat for now During setup he picks Quick setup over the step-by-step Full mode, registers MiniMax M2.7 with a global-direct API key (Anthropic, Kimi, DeepSeek, Gemini, or OpenRouter work the same way), and defers the messaging-platform step to a follow-up Discord guide. On first launch the agent already exposes tools and skills, including a bundled Polymarket research skill.

## Why VPS, not a Mac mini He calls the VPS route the "cleanest" because it gives 24/7 runtime, isolates state from his local files, and costs a few dollars a month — his current server is set to expire in days and renews on a flat monthly fee.