Discord bot hosting

Somewhere to keep a bot online without leaving your own machine running. Most of these are small container plans billed monthly, sold by the same companies that run game servers.

What you are actually buying

A Discord bot is just a small program that needs to stay running. Bot hosting is a container with a runtime, a way to upload your code, and a process manager that restarts it when it crashes.

That means the realistic alternatives are a cheap VPS, a free tier somewhere, or a proper bot host. A VPS is cheaper per unit of resource and teaches you more; bot hosting is worth paying for when you want a panel, instant restarts and somebody to ask when it stops.

What to check

Runtime and version. Node.js, Python and Java are the usual three. Check they run the version your library needs — an old Node breaks discord.js quickly.
RAM. A small bot is happy in 128–256MB. Music bots and anything caching a large guild list need far more.
Sleep policy. Some cheap plans idle your process when it is quiet. For a bot, that is fatal — it must stay connected to the gateway.
Deployment. Panel upload, Git pull, or SFTP? Git is much less painful once you are iterating.
Storage persistence. If the container is wiped on restart, anything your bot wrote to disk is gone.

A word on free hosting

Free bot hosting exists and is usually fine for learning. It is a poor place for a bot your community depends on: free tiers are the first thing cut when a provider has a bad month, and there is rarely a support queue behind them.