Managed Hermes Agent Hosting
Managed Hermes Agent hosting runs Hermes on infrastructure we operate, instead of on your laptop or a VPS you maintain. Mantlecore provisions the virtual machine, keeps the host running, issues HTTPS and takes a daily off-site backup. You choose the model, connect the channels, and decide what the agent is allowed to reach.
Plans start at $19 per month and include a 7-day free trial. A payment card is required at signup, and the trial itself is not charged. New accounts also receive $2 of managed AI credit.
Requirements
Starting at $19/mo with VM isolation, persistent storage, and daily backups.
About Hermes Agent
Hermes is an open-source personal AI agent by Nous Research, designed to be your agent across every platform you already use. Bridges 20 messaging platforms (Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, and more) through a single gateway. Persistent identity via SOUL.md, MEMORY.md, and USER.md — your agent remembers conversations across sessions and grows a procedural-memory library of self-authored skills. Built-in curator periodically refines its own skills library. Multi-provider LLM support routed through our LiteLLM proxy — pick any model, swap anytime. Durable multi-agent kanban and persistent goal loops keep long-running work moving across sessions.
What You Get With Hermes Agent
Features
Use Cases
What we manage, and what stays yours
Managed hosting is a split of responsibility, so it is worth writing the split down rather than leaving it implied.
Deployment
- Mantlecore handles
- Provisioning the virtual machine and the Hermes environment on it
- You control
- Which agent and which plan you deploy
Isolation
- Mantlecore handles
- One virtual machine per agent, each with its own guest kernel
- You control
- Tool permissions, credentials, and which external services the agent can reach
HTTPS
- Mantlecore handles
- Certificates and TLS for your agent's endpoint
- You control
- Which channels and integrations you connect
Storage
- Mantlecore handles
- Persistent VM storage that survives stop, start and restart
- You control
- The files and agent data created inside the workspace
Backups
- Mantlecore handles
- One off-site backup per day, retained for 7 days on Starter and 30 days on larger plans
- You control
- When to restore, and any recovery needed outside the VM
Snapshots
- Mantlecore handles
- An automatic snapshot taken immediately before any version change
- You control
- Your own manual snapshots — 1 on Starter, 3 and 5 on the larger plans
Updates
- Mantlecore handles
- Publishing verified versions, snapshotting before the change, and rolling back automatically if the post-update health check fails
- You control
- When to apply an update, and whether to roll back afterwards
Models
- Mantlecore handles
- Managed model access, or support for your own provider API key
- You control
- Provider, model and budget
Why the VM boundary matters
Hermes can run terminal commands, work with files, drive a browser and reach external services. That makes the runtime boundary part of the hosting decision, not an implementation detail.
A conventional container shares the host kernel with everything else on the machine. Each agent here gets its own virtual machine and its own guest kernel instead, so agent workloads do not share a kernel with one another.
That reduces one class of risk. It does not make every agent action safe. You still want scoped credentials, restricted tool permissions, and human approval for anything irreversible — a machine restore cannot unsend a message, reverse a payment, or undo a write that already reached someone else's database.
Your Hermes state persists
Hermes accumulates configuration, sessions, memory, and a library of skills it writes for itself. Persistent storage keeps that available across restarts rather than resetting the agent to a clean image each time.
Machine state is broader than agent memory, though. Installed packages, service configuration, permissions and scheduled processes all affect whether an agent comes back genuinely usable. Backups here capture the machine, not just a memory file.
Choose managed hosting when the agent is the work
Self-host Hermes if you already operate Linux comfortably, want full root control, or need to customise parts of the stack a managed service does not expose. That is a reasonable choice and this page is not going to argue you out of it.
Use Mantlecore when you want Hermes running on a persistent, isolated VM and would rather not provision a server, configure TLS, or build and test a backup path yourself.
Managed hosting does not make Hermes more capable. It removes the infrastructure work between choosing an agent and keeping it running.
Questions people actually ask
- What is managed Hermes Agent hosting?
- It means Hermes runs on infrastructure operated by a provider rather than on your own laptop or VPS. A provider should tell you exactly which parts it manages — provisioning, the host, HTTPS, storage, backups and the update path — and which parts stay yours. Here, you keep control of the model, the connected services and the agent's permissions.
- Does each Hermes Agent get its own VM?
- Yes. Every agent deployment gets its own virtual machine with its own guest kernel, rather than a container sharing the host kernel with other workloads. That boundary does not replace scoped credentials, network policy, or approval for high-impact actions.
- Will my Hermes memory and skills survive a restart?
- Yes. The workspace is on persistent storage, so memory, skills and configuration are not discarded on a normal restart. A daily off-site backup is a separate recovery control, retained for 7 days on Starter and 30 days on the larger plans.
- Can I use my own model API key?
- Yes. You can bring a supported provider key or use managed model access and pay from credit. Either way, your prompts and the relevant context go to whichever model provider you select — that traffic leaves the VM by design.
- Can a backup reverse anything Hermes has done?
- No, and this is worth being precise about. Restoring a backup recovers machine state as captured at that point. It cannot reverse an action that already completed somewhere else — a sent message, a payment, or a write to an external database stays done.
- Who applies updates, and what happens if one breaks?
- You decide when to update; nothing is upgraded underneath you. When you apply one, a snapshot is taken automatically first, and if the health check afterwards fails the update rolls back on its own. You can also roll back yourself later.
- How much does managed Hermes hosting cost?
- Plans start at $19 per month, with a 7-day free trial and $2 of managed AI credit on new accounts. A payment card is required at signup, though the trial is not charged. Check the pricing page for current terms.
- Should I use Mantlecore or a self-managed VPS?
- Use a VPS if you want root access and are happy owning patching, networking, process supervision, monitoring, backups and restore testing. Use Mantlecore if you want a persistent, isolated Hermes VM without operating the host around it.
Keep reading
- Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw
Still deciding which framework fits the job
- Backup and restore for a persistent AI agent
What recovery actually covers, and where it stops
- What people actually report running Hermes
Practitioner reports rather than vendor copy
Ready to deploy Hermes Agent?
Its own VM. Persistent workspace. Managed backups and update recovery.