Free Discord bot hosting: what you really get

Free hosting is the first thing most people try, and it is fine for learning. It tends to break once other people rely on the bot. These are the limits to look for, whoever the provider is.

What free hosts commonly limit

• Sleeping. Some free plans stop your program after a period without web traffic. A Discord bot has no web traffic, so it can go offline unless something pings it.
• Memory and CPU. Often a few hundred megabytes shared with other users. A bot that caches many servers can hit the limit and be killed.
• Runtime hours. Monthly hour limits can leave the bot off at the end of the month.
• Changes and shutdowns. Free tiers are the first thing a company changes. A bot you depend on can lose its host with little notice.
• No support, no backups. If something breaks you are on your own.
• Shared addresses. Many bots on one address can get rate limited by Discord together.

Your own computer

Running the bot on your PC costs nothing, but it is offline whenever the computer sleeps, restarts or loses its connection, and the bot's token lives on a machine you also browse the web on.

When free is enough

A bot only you use, a test bot, or a project you are learning on. Downtime does not matter.

When to pay

A bot your community uses, a music bot, a moderation bot or anything people get annoyed about when it is down. A paid bot server on PlayNHost starts at a few dollars a month and gives you:

• A bot that stays on and restarts itself after a crash
• Fixed memory and CPU you can see on a graph
• Files, console and SFTP, plus a database
• Backups and a money-back guarantee of 72 hours
• Support if the platform has a problem

There is no free plan with us, because a free plan is what makes a host unreliable for everyone. Our rules for what a bot may do are in Discord bot hosting rules and fair use. To start, see How to host a Discord bot 24/7.