If not Glitch, what other free service can I use to host a Discord bot?

So right now glitch has blocked pings, meaning bots won’t stay alive. Reading over some other comments, I see that people are saying that Glitch isn’t the place to host a Discord bot at any rate. Do you guys know of any other free alternatives?

Thanks.

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being 100% honest, there are no good free hosts that have discord bots in mind, i would suggest getting a vps or self hosting

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The Glitch-blocks-ping situation is not permanent, it’s temporary!

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what about heroku? I think can do a free host for them

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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it would work but its still not great

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Well, it does seem like a good alternative but…

I would recommend checking the docs first, because you need to know how to setup dynos and all that

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Thanks for the reply. I guess I’ll just stick with Glitch then.

What’s wrong with heroku?

It’s not too bad. I migrated my projects from glitch to heroku last night. Just export to github from glitch, and then import from that github repo in heroku. Absolutely flawless transition. The only thing you might have to do is change the hardcoded port number to process.env.port. Whenever you push to github heroku automatically deploys the new changes. Pretty simple. Not as nice as glitch but glitch is way too unreliable. This is coming from someone who was willing to buy glitch boost and did, until it was way too unreliable to host anything on.

Good free host is an oxymoron in my opinion, you get what you paid for

Also the only problem I have with heroku is the filesystem isn’t persistent, meaning fs-based databases won’t work there

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Do you have a link to oxymoron? And what do you mean by “you get what you paid for”?

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if you get something free dont expect it to be great

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Oxymoron isn’t a hosting service, its an expression to show that two words are opposites. :smile:

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like a paradox…

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Oh I get it now, I misunderstood the sentence :laughing:.

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  1. Heroku’s free tier gives 550 hours per month, which is ~18 hours per day. That would fall short if you wanted a service up 24/7 for the whole month.
  2. Heroku doesn’t have built in persistent storage. You’d have to sign up for a database service or something on top of that, which is an extra bit of hassle. Plus, you have to fit all your state through whatever fiddly API that database service uses, which is additional work.
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If you know your way around how to manage actual servers, I recomend going with this organization that helps people get free servers to host their projects. Though they are free, and will be able to host your projects on a REAL VPS, they do have a strict rules and renewal (still free) system for the VPSes that may be hard to get used to. They also have online coding classes, coding support, and much more. Here’s their Discord server which tells you how to get started.

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I now have “vps, rdp” how can I convert it for hosting.

I was planning for the paid tier and asked on the forum if in the paid plan, glitch would be on all the time. I received a negative answer saying all the servers would be affected irrespective of the plan.

The projects i need to work on need to working 100% during the daytime and on weekdays. Heroku’s free tier has worked brilliantly with no issues the past month. If i need more hours i need to just add a credit card.

I think if we pay we need reliable service. I would be billing my client for the hosting and for sure people would not pay if the hosting is so unreliable and also since few months.

You could git pull your project

ahahahaha sorry, i could have made that clearer :grimacing: but i see this was answered above

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  1. You can pay $7 per month for a hobby plan for unlimited hours per month (comparable to glitch boost’s pricing)

  2. Who told you that? I have an sqlite database on heroku. I literally transferred my entire project from glitch to heroku and it worked perfectly.

It’s just documented as how Heroku works. I Googled around just now and found this reference: Active Storage on Heroku | Heroku Dev Center

Heroku has an “ephemeral” hard drive, this means that you can write files to disk, but those files will not persist after the application is restarted.

Dunno if there’s a better source for it than this one buried in something rather Ruby-specific though.


edit: oh here it is Dynos and the Dyno Manager | Heroku Dev Center

During the dyno’s lifetime its running processes can use the filesystem as a temporary scratchpad, but no files that are written are visible to processes in any other dyno and any files written will be discarded the moment the dyno is stopped or restarted.

One of the benefits of self-hosting is it is really only a one time payment for a machine such as a Raspberry Pi. While it may take a while to configure and set up, it will be worth it in the long run if you website or bots sees only a small(ish) amount of traffic.

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I have a pi 4 setup with my bots and a web server and its 100% worth it

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If anyone is just now reading this, here is a great guide:

https://support.glitch.com/t/heres-what-to-do-after-glitch-banned-pinging-services-guide/27364

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@anon43649539 How have you set up multiple bots on one system? Or are they all controlled via one javascript/nodejs instance? Maybe DM the answer as it may be a little off topic :joy:

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You could use something like https://npm.im/pm2 to run multiple Node.js processes at once.

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Try using repl.it
It works amazing!

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Morning! To answer the question, as @anon43649539 said. There are no Good free hosts around, everything has their own catches. Heroku for me is flawless but you can only host 1 project at max to run for a month. If anyone says repl.it again, it’s not gonna give you a private instance. Vercel? Maybe but it’s build process is complicated. g i t h u b a c t i o n s? Not a good idea as it also has limits for the maximum runtime hours of workflows.

Is is really best for you to yknow, get a server, a VPS. Its easier that all of the above once setup. You’ll never know when the services listed above will change direction since people are flocking to use up their resources. And its free.

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Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I have been hosting my bots locally and have encountered little to no problems.

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