A lot of the self hosting questions on here turn out to be hardware questions rather than software questions, and the answers usually skip the boring part. This is the version I wish someone had handed me before I rented the first box for an always on agent setup.
The Software Is Free, The Server Is Not
Most of the agent platforms worth running are a Docker install. Auto Learning Agents is one of them, so the license cost is zero and the entire recurring cost is the machine underneath. That sounds obvious until you price it, because the machine is the part that decides whether the thing is usable at all.
The reason you want a server in the first place is uptime. An agent that only runs while your laptop is open is a script. An agent that runs on a box with root access, comes back after a reboot, and keeps working while you sleep is a platform. That difference is entirely infrastructure.
What The Box Actually Needs
Root access is not optional, because the install assumes it. Past that, the requirement splits on one decision: are you calling a hosted model API, or running the model locally?
If you are calling an API, the platform itself is light. A cheap VPS handles a single user setup comfortably and CPU matters more than anything exotic.
If you are running the model locally, RAM becomes the binding constraint before anything else does. A quantized 7B model wants roughly 8GB just to sit resident, and it climbs quickly from there. The common mistake is sizing the box for the platform and forgetting that the model has to live in the same memory.
Where People Get Burned
Three things, roughly in the order they bite.
Disk fills up. Logs, model weights and container layers all grow, and nothing warns you until a write fails.
Memory gets oversubscribed. Two models resident at once on a box sized for one, and the OOM killer picks the process you cared about.
Nothing restarts. The host reboots for a kernel update and the agent quietly stays down for a day because the container was never set to come back on its own.
None of these are hard problems. They are just invisible until they happen to you.
Start Small And Upgrade When It Earns It
The honest advice is to start on the smallest box that fits the model you picked, run it for a week, and watch memory and disk before scaling anything. Most single user setups never outgrow that. Sizing up front for load you do not have yet is the most common way to make a free platform expensive.
