24/7 Discord bot hosting, and what that really requires
A Discord bot holds a WebSocket open to Discord's gateway. The moment the process sleeps, the bot is offline and misses every command and event until it reconnects. 24/7 means a process that never sleeps, restarts when it crashes, and comes back after the machine reboots.
Why sleeping platforms cannot host a bot
Free web tiers on generalist platforms spin a service down after minutes without HTTP traffic. A web page survives that: the next visitor waits a few seconds. A bot does not: its gateway connection is gone and nothing wakes it. The keep-alive trick (a tiny web server plus an uptime pinger) turns the bot into a web app to fool the platform; it breaks whenever the pinger has an outage and is against most platforms' terms.
The three ways that work
| Option | What it costs | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| An old PC or a Raspberry Pi at home | Electricity, your uptime | Set up auto-restart, keep it on, survive power cuts |
| A VPS | $4 to $6 a month | Linux administration, a process manager, updates, backups |
| Managed bot hosting | Free, then $2 a month | Connect the repository, set the token, push to deploy |
What always-on means here
The bot runs in its own sandbox with hard memory and CPU limits. If it crashes, it restarts and the crash doctor explains why. If the node reboots for maintenance, the bot comes back with it. Deploys happen on every push, with a rollback to the previous build in one click. The free tier's bot process never sleeps; only its web address sleeps when nobody opens it.
Frequently asked questions
Does the free bot stay online 24/7?
Yes. The process never sleeps and restarts on a crash. There are no renewal clicks or coins.
What happens during maintenance?
Nodes are updated with the bots restarted afterwards; a bot that was running comes back on its own.
Can I get notified when the bot goes down?
The panel shows the bot's status and the crash doctor's explanation; the Discord status-bot template posts a game server's status, and a health check path can be set for apps with a web address.
How is 24/7 different from a VPS?
A VPS gives you a machine; keeping the bot up is your job. Here the platform restarts, redeploys and rolls back for you, from $2 a month.