Cloudways + Hermes Agent = 24/7 Faceless YouTube Automation
The whole system in one shot
This video shows a 24/7 agent that picks video topics for a faceless YouTube channel. It runs on Cloudways, a managed VPS host. The channel is Lord Yapper, which explains history with stick-figure animations. Hermes, the agent, handles research and planning. Higgsfield, a separate AI tool, creates the actual video.
The point is not to remove the human. It is to remove the boring prep work. Hermes finds trending topics that fit the channel, checks against past videos, and builds a content package. That package lands in Telegram. You review it. If it looks good, you copy the final prompt and send it to Higgsfield. Higgsfield writes the script, does the voiceover, makes the animations, and finishes the edit.
What problem this fixes
Before this setup, each video took about 12 hours. That includes manual research, finding topics, and fighting with Higgsfield's sandbox. The sandbox kept wiping work files because they were too big. The fix was to connect Google Drive as a save point. Now Higgsfield can store assets there and output a full video without stalling.
There is also the money problem. A faceless channel earns roughly $2 to $5 per 1,000 views from AdSense. The creator's Constantinople video got 221 views in two weeks. A similar channel, Animated History, got 423,000 views in 5 days. To make money, you need topics that are timely, not generic. The agent found a 4,000-year-old tomb discovered in Saqqara, covered by Archaeology magazine a day before. That is the kind of angle a human might miss after doing this five or seven times a week. Most people burn out before the channel grows. This system removes the repetitive research so you can keep going.
Why Cloudways instead of a cheap VPS
The honest part: Hermes itself is open source. You could run this exact workflow on your own PC or a cheaper raw VPS. It can do the research, use custom skills, and send Telegram messages. But there are tradeoffs.
If Hermes runs on your PC, the workflow dies when the PC turns off. A cheaper VPS stays online 24/7, but then you own the maintenance. You deploy Hermes, secure the server, update software, test updates, set up backups, watch resources, and fix crashes. With Cloudways, you click a few buttons in a dashboard. Choose the Hermes agent, pick a region, pick an instance size. The creator picked the "Operator" size, not "Scout," because he needed storage for all the research data. Cloudways handles security updates and infrastructure. It also checks new Hermes versions before rolling them out, so an update is less likely to break your skills or cron jobs. The instance is backed up, and there is a restore path if you mess up settings. You still get SSH credentials if you want to tinker.
Keeping a human in the loop
One caveat: Hermes on Cloudways does not yet have continuous browser use. That means it cannot log into Higgsfield and run the production by itself. The creator actually likes this. You do not want an agent auto-approving everything and draining your Higgsfield credits. So Hermes does research and ops, and the human remains the middleman who says yes or no. Higgsfield is the creative engine. Hermes is the data gatherer.
Setting up Telegram is optional but useful. You create a bot with BotFather, set a home channel, and then you can get instant notifications or talk to the agent from your phone. The web session and Telegram session are separate, so they do not share context. The creator uses Telegram mostly for notifications.
The takeaway: this is a practical way to make a faceless channel sustainable. The agent does the grind, you keep the final call, and the managed host keeps the lights on.