Hosting a Discord bot

A Discord bot has to run permanently: the moment your computer shuts down, the bot goes offline. The solution is a small server that stays on around the clock, most often a VPS. It costs little and stays up all year, including while you sleep.

Why a VPS rather than free hosting

Free platforms put bots to sleep after a few minutes of inactivity, cap monthly compute time or kill long-running processes. A reliable bot needs a machine that belongs to you and never dozes off. An Eco VPS at €6.90 is more than enough for one or several bots: 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and NVMe, provisioned in under 60 seconds.

What size of server

• One or two bots (discord.js, discord.py, JDA): the Eco VPS is comfortable.
• Music bot or audio/video processing: these workloads consume CPU and bandwidth; aim for the ARM VPS or the Pro VPS depending on the load.
• Several bots + a database + other services: step up to the Pro VPS, with headroom for PostgreSQL or Redis.

Keeping it running around the clock

Once connected over SSH, the good practice is to run the bot as a system-managed service, so it restarts automatically after a crash or a machine reboot:

• Put your bot in a systemd service (Restart=always), or in a Docker container with restart: unless-stopped.
• Keep your tokens out of the code, in an environment file with restricted permissions.
• Watch memory: a leaking bot eventually gets killed by the system.

This approach avoids tools like screen or nohup, which do not survive a reboot.

Latency and location

Discord runs its infrastructure all over the world; from Europe, a server in Germany or Finland gives very low latency to the API. You pick the location at checkout (Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki).

Anonymity and payment

Ordering requires no account, and payment accepts card, Bitcoin, Lightning and Monero. Handy for a community project run by several people, without tying the server to a single identity.

To get the administration basics right, read getting started with a VPS. To pick the machine, compare the VPS range.