The Best Free Discord Bot Hosting Options In 2019

If you add ready-made bots to your Discord server, hosting is taken care of. But what if you create your own bot? How do you host it so it’s always available on your channels? This guide will walk you through the process from beginning to end and will include some of the best free Discord bot hosting options in 2019.

To reiterate. If you are adding bots to your server from Discord Bot List or one of the many other bot lists, you don’t need bot hosting. You only need to worry about it if you have created your own bot and want to make it available on your server.

Hosting a Discord bot

If you created a bot, you’re going to need it to be available 24/7 for others to use. You have several options to achieve this, use your own computer and leave it running, set up a Raspberry Pi and leave that running, use a free web server, VPS or use dedicated Discord bot hosting. Those final two are not free but are worth including anyway.

Let’s take a look at each.

Host your own Discord bot

Hosting your Discord bot on your computer is actually much easier than you might think. All you need is the environment you coded it in and to leave the computer on 24/7. For example, if you built your bot in Python, you will need Python running on your computer with access to the bot. If you used Node.js, you will need that installed. API requests from your Discord server will automatically be picked up by your runtime and route to the bot. As long as your PC is reliable and your internet has no data caps, this works fine.

Use a Raspberry Pi to run your bot

Raspberry Pi can be so much more than just a place to practice code. One excellent use for them is to run a Discord bot. Like running in on the PC, you will need the relevant runtime environment, Python, Node,js or whatever running on your Raspberry Pi and the bot loaded but otherwise is another no cost, low maintenance way to run it.

This guide walks you through the entire process of hosting a bot and should work perfectly well for your needs.

Free web servers for a Discord bot

There are a bunch of free web servers out there but Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular. There is a free version of the AWS that allows access to the Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. It is here that you can host your bot. The first year of AWS access is free before you will begin to pay for it. There is nothing stopping you setting up one account for the free period and then another and another…

This guide is one of the best I could find that covers setting up AWS to host a bot.

Host a bot using VPS

VPS is a Virtual Private Server and works just like a web server for a website. It’s a server permanently connected to the internet running web services and you rent a virtualized instance on that server. VPS can be configured however you want them to be and in this example, you would set up a Python or Node.js instance and load your bot files there.

Most reliable VPS are not free but cost around $2-$5 per month. This guide walks you through setting up a VPS for a Discord bot. It was created by a VPS vendor so isn’t impartial but you don’t have to use their VPS, just their information.

Use dedicated bot hosting

Believe it or not, there is such a thing as dedicated bot hosting. There are companies out there that offer this service alongside other cloud services. They are usually quite cheap and easy to set up but this will vary by vendor. Providers of bot hosting include Deploys.io, Gameserverkings.com, BotGhost and Zeit. I’m sure there are lots of other vendors but you get the idea.

Zeit has a free tier but the others cost money. You will need to set up an account and follow the instructions to upload your bot and deploy it. BotGhost also offers the ability to build your bot on the platform and deploy it from there. Find a vendor you like the look of and use that one. They all offer very similar features.

There is no ‘best’ Discord bot hosting option, only the one that works best for you. Many server owners I know use VPS while a couple use AWS. I have heard of plenty who have gone the Raspberry Pi route too. They all work and they can all host your bot reliably 24/7.

Do you have any other suggestions for Discord bot hosting? Tell us below if you do!