If you built your own bot, hosting is the annoying part: your PC can't stay on forever, and "free 24/7 hosting" searches (up ~120% this year) are full of services that sleep, throttle or vanish. Here's the current honest state of free hosting.
The realistic free options
- Oracle Cloud Free Tier — the most generous permanent free VPS (ARM, up to 24GB RAM split across instances). Setup is the hardest of this list; availability varies by region. Breakout search trend for a reason.
- Railway — beautiful DX, deploys straight from GitHub. The free trial credit runs out; expect ~$5/month after. Searches up 700%, so clearly people accept that.
- Render — free web services sleep after inactivity, which kills a Discord bot's gateway connection. Works only with keep-alive hacks; better paid.
- Wispbyte / Katabump-style panels — free Pterodactyl hosts run by small teams. Fine for hobby bots; assume downtime and don't store anything precious.
- Raspberry Pi at home — one-time cost, genuinely 24/7, and great for learning Linux.
What "free" costs you
Sleep timers, shared CPU, no backups, and hosts that shut down without notice. If your community relies on the bot, a $3–5 VPS (or a Pi) beats every free tier for reliability.
The alternative: don't host at all
Most servers run custom bots for tickets, welcome messages, invoicing or moderation — problems already solved by hosted bots. Noxyr covers tickets, security, welcome flows, invoices, giveaways and more, hosted for you, free. Save the VPS for the genuinely custom ideas.