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.