My instance won't start

What to check when your instance is stuck or fails to start.

What this is

You clicked Start in your Beach dashboard, but several minutes later the instance is still stuck on "starting" — or it shows an error. This is rare; usually it's a transient AWS hiccup on Beach's side and resolves on its own. Your data is safe either way (it lives on persistent storage attached to your instance, not on the running server itself).

Try these in order

  1. Wait 5 more minutes. Starting an instance for the first time, or after a reset or restore, can take a few minutes. The Beach dashboard updates automatically once it's ready.
  2. Refresh the Beach dashboard. Sometimes the status indicator lags behind the real state of your instance.
  3. If the dashboard shows "error", click Start again. Most one-off start failures clear up on a second attempt — they're caused by transient cloud issues, not anything wrong with your account or data.
  4. If it still fails after a second attempt, contact support. Include:
    • Your instance subdomain (the sd-XXXXXXXX.beachhost.io link from your dashboard)
    • The time you first saw the issue (rough is fine)
    • What the dashboard shows now

Note on the boundary

Starting and stopping your instance is something Beach handles — it's the hosting layer. If your instance starts fine but your agent isn't working once it's up, that's an OpenClaw-side issue and a different troubleshooting page applies (see agent-silent below).

Related

Still stuck?

Contact support — see Getting support.