What Is AI Hosting? A Developer's Guide¶
You've built an AI agent. It calls GPT-4, uses LangChain, runs perfectly on your laptop. Now someone says "just host it."
Host it where? How? What does "AI hosting" even mean for an agent that needs to run on a schedule, keep secrets, and not cost a fortune?
Here's what AI hosting actually means, what your options are, and how to pick the right one.
AI hosting vs regular hosting¶
Regular hosting runs a web server. A request comes in, your server responds, done. The server is stateless, predictable, and mostly idle.
AI hosting is different. Your agent:
- Calls LLM APIs — each invocation burns tokens and costs money
- Runs for minutes, not milliseconds — an agent loop with tool calls can take 30 seconds to 15 minutes
- Needs secrets at runtime — API keys injected securely, never on disk
- Runs on a schedule — daily research agent, hourly monitoring bot, weekly report generator
- Needs isolation — agent A must never touch agent B's data
A standard VPS or serverless function wasn't designed for any of this.
The three models of AI hosting¶
1. Serverless functions (Lambda, Cloud Functions)¶
You write your agent as a function. The platform runs it when triggered.
Pros: No servers to manage, pay-per-execution, scales to zero.
Cons: Hard timeout (Lambda = 15 minutes max), cold starts, no built-in secrets isolation per agent, no agent-aware observability. You're wiring together 5+ services (Lambda, EventBridge, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, IAM).
Best for: Simple, short-running agents that don't need persistent state.
2. Container platforms (Fly.io, Railway, self-managed ECS)¶
You containerize your agent with Docker and deploy to a platform that runs containers.
Pros: Full control over the runtime, no artificial timeout, always-on support.
Cons: You write Dockerfiles. You manage IAM roles. You set up cron yourself. Observability is on you. It's 2 weeks of infrastructure per agent.
Best for: Teams that need full control and have dedicated DevOps.
3. Purpose-built AI agent platforms (HollowHost)¶
A platform designed specifically for deploying AI agents. You point it at your GitHub repository and it handles the rest.
Pros: No Dockerfiles, no IAM, no cron setup. Automatic per-agent isolation, built-in secrets management, run history dashboard, always-on daemons.
Cons: Less flexibility than raw containers. No GPU support (for model inference — LLM API calls work fine).
Best for: Teams that want to ship agents, not infrastructure.
How HollowHost handles AI hosting¶
HollowHost is purpose-built for the AI agent use case. Here's how it maps to what your agent actually needs:
| Agent need | How HollowHost solves it |
|---|---|
| Run my Python agent | 1 command: hollowhost ai-jobs create --repo you/agent --lang python --pm uv |
| Inject API keys securely | hollowhost ai-jobs env import <id> --file .env — encrypted at rest, never in logs |
| Run every 6 hours | hollowhost ai-jobs update <id> --schedule "0 */6 * * *" |
| Don't let agents touch each other | Per-agent dedicated IAM execution role, isolated secrets and logs |
| Show me what happened | Dashboard with run history, duration, token usage, full logs |
| Keep an agent always online | AI Daemons — persistent VMs with a web control dashboard |
The platform handles containerization, IAM provisioning, secrets injection, scheduling, and observability. You write the agent; HollowHost runs it.
Comparison: hosting options for AI agents¶
| Lambda | Containers | HollowHost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deploy from GitHub | ❌ | ⚠️ DIY | ✅ 1 command |
| Per-agent IAM isolation | ⚠️ DIY | ⚠️ DIY | ✅ Automatic |
| Cron scheduling | ✅ EventBridge | ⚠️ DIY | ✅ Built-in |
| Secrets management | ⚠️ Separate service | ⚠️ DIY | ✅ Built-in |
| Agent run dashboard | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Always-on daemons | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Timeout | 15 min max | Unlimited | 15 min (configurable) |
| Time to first run | 1-2 days | 1-2 weeks | 5 minutes |
Which model should you choose?¶
- You're prototyping, need a quick function? → Lambda
- You need full infrastructure control? → Containers (ECS, Fly.io)
- You want to ship agents, not manage infrastructure? → HollowHost
The right choice depends on where you want to spend your time: on your agent's logic, or on the infrastructure that runs it.
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