Hosting Your Bot
Often, you'll need some sort of server or host to run your bot 24/7. There are a number of options available:
Affordable Paid Hosting
These hosts offer 24/7 VPSs, are usually very affordable, and are trustworthy. Which one is best for you depends on where you live, your budget, and what features you need.
Free Tiers Services
These hosts have a free tier that you can use for your bots. These usually will require a credit card to verify yourself.
- Oracle Cloud gives an incredible 24 GB of RAM and 4 VCPUs (1 VCPU is usually one core of a CPU the host uses) for its free tier, as well as two Oracle Linux 1 GB RAM 1 VCPU VMs. Note, though, that support may be lackluster, and it may not work in certain regions.
- Google Cloud Platform offers a respectable 1 GB of RAM and 0.25 VCPUs (Discord bots typically do not need much when starting out) for its always free tier.
- With the GitHub Student Developer Pack, you can get enough in free credits (renewed annually) to sustain a bot on Microsoft Azure as well as other goodies, all without a credit card. Note that this requires some sort of proof that you are a student, from an email to a report card/transcript.
- Amazon Web Services offers an EC2 instance (which you can run a bot on) for free for 12 months.
Self-Hosting
Self-hosting poses its own challenges, as you usually need to ensure that you have a device capable running 24/7 and is either immune or able to avoid any power outages/disruptions to your internet. However, if you can guarantee that, or are okay with facing downtime, then virtually any modern-day device is able to run a bot - Python doesn't take much to run. A Raspberry Pi is often used for this purpose, but any (ideally spare) computer can be used - installing Linux can make even the oldest computers usable for basic bots.
Special care should be taken to make sure your internet and device is protected from any malicious attacks.
Other Options
- From time to time, you may hear about a service that requires running a webpage alongside a bot and pinging the page every once in a while to keep the program alive. These services are not recommended and not supported in interactions.py. Running a webpage to keep pinging means taking away a sizable amount of resources from your bot to do that, and with the limited free tiers that these services provide, that often can become a big issue. You're also just not using these services to their intended purpose - the hosts have all the right to control these attempts at hosting bots on their services.
- There may be more services out there claiming to run a Discord bot for free. View these services with skepticism - at the very worst, they could be stealing your Discord tokens to hijack your bot and destroy servers it's in. Remember: if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.
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