What Discord Bots Are
Discord bots are automated programs that interact with the Discord platform through its Application Programming Interface, commonly known as the Discord API. They run as separate applications outside of Discord itself and connect to the platform using a special authentication token. Once connected, bots can perform a wide range of tasks that would otherwise require manual effort from server administrators and moderators.
At their core, Discord bots listen for events that happen within a Discord server. These events include messages being sent, new members joining, reactions being added, voice channel activity, and dozens of other interactions. When a bot detects an event it has been programmed to respond to, it executes the corresponding code and sends its response back to Discord through the API.
Bots can serve many purposes within a Discord community. Moderation bots automatically enforce server rules by detecting spam, filtering inappropriate language, and managing user roles. Utility bots provide helpful features such as reminders, polls, and server statistics. Entertainment bots offer games, music playback, and fun commands that keep community members engaged. Some bots are designed for very specific use cases, such as integrating with external services like GitHub, Trello, or game servers to provide real-time notifications and updates directly within Discord channels.
The Discord API supports two primary methods of interaction. The Gateway API maintains a persistent WebSocket connection that allows bots to receive real-time events and maintain presence information. The REST API handles direct requests for actions like sending messages, managing channels, and modifying server settings. Most bot libraries handle both of these APIs seamlessly, allowing developers to focus on building features rather than managing low-level network connections.
Why Bots Need Hosting
A Discord bot is a standalone application that must be running continuously in order to respond to events and commands. Unlike web applications that only need to process requests when users visit a page, Discord bots maintain a persistent connection to the Discord Gateway. If the bot process stops running, the bot appears offline in Discord and cannot respond to any interactions.
Running a bot on your personal computer might work for initial development and testing, but it presents significant limitations for production use. Your computer would need to remain powered on and connected to the internet around the clock. Power outages, system updates, network interruptions, and simply wanting to shut down your computer would all cause your bot to go offline. For a bot that serves an active community, any downtime can disrupt workflows and frustrate users who depend on its features.
Dedicated hosting solves these problems by providing a stable environment where your bot can run continuously without depending on your personal hardware. Hosting providers maintain servers in data centres with redundant power supplies, multiple internet connections, and climate-controlled environments designed specifically for running applications without interruption. This infrastructure ensures your bot stays online even when your home computer is turned off, restarting, or experiencing local network issues.
Hosting also provides consistent performance. A bot running on your personal computer competes for resources with your operating system, web browser, games, and other applications. On a dedicated host, your bot receives allocated resources that are reserved specifically for its use, resulting in more predictable response times and reliable performance under load.
Node.js vs Python Discord Bots
The two most popular programming languages for building Discord bots are JavaScript (running on Node.js) and Python. Each language has its own ecosystem of libraries, strengths, and trade-offs that make it better suited for different types of projects and developers.
Node.js bots typically use the discord.js library, which is the most widely adopted Discord bot framework. JavaScript is an event-driven language by nature, which aligns well with the event-based architecture of Discord bots. Node.js handles asynchronous operations efficiently through its non-blocking I/O model, making it particularly well-suited for bots that need to handle many concurrent interactions. The npm package ecosystem provides access to hundreds of thousands of packages for extending your bot with additional functionality such as database connections, web scraping, image processing, and API integrations.
Python bots commonly use the discord.py library or its maintained forks. Python is often praised for its readable syntax and gentle learning curve, making it an excellent choice for developers who are new to programming. The language offers powerful built-in data structures and a clean approach to asynchronous programming through the asyncio module. Python also excels in areas like data analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing, which can be valuable for building intelligent bots that analyse user behaviour or process text in sophisticated ways.
From a hosting perspective, both languages are well-supported by virtually all bot hosting providers. Node.js tends to use slightly less memory for simple bots due to its lightweight event loop architecture. Python can be more memory-intensive but offers faster development cycles for complex logic. The choice between the two often comes down to personal preference and prior experience rather than any fundamental technical limitation.
Other languages such as Java, Go, Rust, and C# also have Discord libraries available, but they represent a smaller share of the bot development community and may have fewer tutorials and community resources available for beginners.
Requirements for 24/7 Bot Hosting
Running a Discord bot around the clock requires meeting several key requirements that ensure consistent availability and performance. Understanding these requirements helps you choose the right hosting solution and configure your bot properly for long-term stability.
- Persistent process management: Your bot needs a process manager that keeps it running continuously and automatically restarts it if it crashes. Tools like PM2 for Node.js or systemd services handle this responsibility by monitoring your bot process and restarting it immediately upon failure.
- Stable network connection: Discord bots require a consistent internet connection to maintain their WebSocket connection to the Discord Gateway. Brief network interruptions are usually handled gracefully by bot libraries through automatic reconnection, but prolonged outages will cause your bot to appear offline.
- Sufficient memory: Most simple Discord bots require between 50MB and 200MB of RAM. Bots that cache large amounts of data, serve many guilds, or perform memory-intensive tasks like image processing may require significantly more. Monitoring memory usage helps prevent out-of-memory crashes.
- CPU resources: Basic command-response bots use minimal CPU, but bots that process images, run calculations, or handle high volumes of events need more processing power. Ensuring adequate CPU allocation prevents your bot from becoming sluggish during peak usage.
- Storage space: Your bot needs enough storage for its code, dependencies, and any data it creates such as databases, logs, or cached files. Most bots require less than 500MB of total storage, but bots with local databases or extensive logging may need more.
- Correct Node.js or Python version: Ensure your hosting environment provides a compatible runtime version for your bot and its dependencies. Using an outdated runtime can cause compatibility issues and security vulnerabilities.
Common Hosting Methods
There are several approaches to hosting a Discord bot, each with different levels of complexity, cost, and control. The right choice depends on your technical expertise, budget, and the specific requirements of your bot.
Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
A VPS provides you with a virtualised server environment where you have full control over the operating system, installed software, and configuration. Providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr offer VPS instances starting at around five dollars per month. This option gives you maximum flexibility but requires system administration knowledge to set up and maintain the server, install dependencies, configure firewalls, and manage security updates.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS providers like Railway and Render abstract away server management and let you deploy your bot by pushing code to a repository. These services handle the underlying infrastructure, automatic restarts, and scaling. They typically offer free tiers with limited resources and paid plans for production workloads. PaaS is a good middle ground between full server control and fully managed hosting.
Dedicated Bot Hosting
Services designed specifically for Discord bot hosting, such as MonkeyBytes Hosting, provide pre-configured environments optimised for running bots. These platforms typically include features like one-click deployment, SFTP file management, console access, and automatic process management. They remove the complexity of server administration while providing the specific tools that bot developers need.
Home Server or Raspberry Pi
Running your bot on a home server or single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi is possible and eliminates recurring hosting costs. However, this approach depends entirely on your home internet connection and power supply, making it less reliable than professional hosting options. It can be a good solution for personal bots that do not require guaranteed uptime.
Free vs Paid Hosting
Free hosting services provide an accessible entry point for new bot developers who want to deploy their first bot without financial commitment. These services typically offer limited resources such as reduced memory, CPU, and storage allocations. Some free hosts impose restrictions like forced sleep periods where your bot goes offline after a period of inactivity, limited uptime hours per month, or automatic shutdowns that require manual restarts.
Not all free hosting is created equal, however. Some providers, like MonkeyBytes Hosting, offer genuinely free hosting with no sleep timers, no forced downtime, and no trial expiration. The key difference lies in the business model: community-driven and not-for-profit services can provide sustainable free hosting because they are not trying to convert free users into paying customers through artificial limitations.
Paid hosting services generally offer more resources, better performance guarantees, priority support, and service level agreements that promise specific uptime percentages. For bots that serve large communities or perform resource-intensive tasks, paid hosting may be necessary to ensure adequate performance. The cost of paid hosting ranges from a few dollars per month for basic plans to significantly more for high-resource configurations.
When evaluating free versus paid options, consider the size of your bot user base, the complexity of your bot functionality, how critical uptime is for your community, and whether the free tier resources are genuinely sufficient for your needs. Many developers start with free hosting and only move to paid options when their bot outgrows the available resources.
How MonkeyBytes Hosting Works
MonkeyBytes Hosting is a not-for-profit Discord bot hosting service that provides free resources to developers without the common restrictions found on other platforms. Every account receives 1GB of RAM, 1GB of SSD storage, and 150% dedicated CPU allocation from the moment it is created, with no trial periods or expiration dates.
The platform is built on the Pterodactyl panel, an open-source game server management system that has been adapted for bot hosting. This provides users with a web-based control panel where they can manage their bot files, view console output, monitor resource usage, and restart their bot with a single click. The panel also supports SFTP access, allowing developers to upload and manage files using standard file transfer tools.
Deploying a bot on MonkeyBytes involves creating an account, provisioning a new server through the dashboard, uploading your bot files via SFTP or the built-in file manager, and starting the server. The platform automatically detects the runtime environment based on your bot files and configures the appropriate startup command. For Node.js bots, this typically involves running npm install followed by your main script. For Python bots, pip dependencies are installed from requirements.txt before executing your main file.
MonkeyBytes includes a maintenance mode feature that allows developers to safely deploy updates without their bot crashing mid-update. When maintenance mode is enabled, the bot continues running while files are being uploaded, and then gracefully restarts once the update is complete. This prevents the partial file upload issues that can occur when updating a live bot.
The service operates on a community-driven model where resources are funded through donations and run by volunteers who are passionate about supporting the Discord bot development community. There are no paid tiers, no premium features locked behind paywalls, and no plans to introduce monetisation that would compromise the free nature of the service.
Security Best Practices
Security is a critical consideration when hosting a Discord bot. Your bot token is essentially a password that grants full access to your bot account, and compromising it could allow an attacker to impersonate your bot, access servers it belongs to, and potentially cause significant damage to communities that rely on it.
- Never hardcode your bot token: Store your token in an environment variable or a configuration file that is excluded from version control. Use a .env file with a library like dotenv to load sensitive values at runtime.
- Add .env to your .gitignore: If you use Git for version control, ensure that files containing secrets are listed in your .gitignore file to prevent accidental commits that expose your credentials.
- Regenerate compromised tokens immediately: If you suspect your token has been exposed, go to the Discord Developer Portal and regenerate it immediately. Update the token in your hosting environment before restarting your bot.
- Use minimal permissions: When creating your bot invite link, only request the permissions your bot actually needs. Avoid granting Administrator permission unless your bot genuinely requires every possible permission.
- Validate user input: If your bot accepts input from users, always validate and sanitise it before processing. This prevents injection attacks and unexpected behaviour from malformed input.
- Keep dependencies updated: Regularly update your bot libraries and their dependencies to patch known security vulnerabilities. Use tools like npm audit or pip audit to identify packages with known issues.
- Implement rate limiting: Add rate limiting to your bot commands to prevent abuse. This protects both your bot from being overwhelmed and the Discord API from receiving too many requests.
- Use SFTP instead of FTP: When uploading files to your host, always use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) rather than plain FTP. SFTP encrypts the connection, preventing your files and credentials from being intercepted in transit.
Performance Considerations
As your bot grows and serves more users and servers, performance becomes increasingly important. Slow response times frustrate users, and excessive resource consumption can lead to crashes or hosting limits being exceeded. Planning for performance from the beginning saves significant refactoring effort later.
Caching is one of the most effective performance optimisations for Discord bots. Most bot libraries maintain an internal cache of guilds, channels, members, and messages that the bot has seen. This cache allows the bot to access frequently needed data without making additional API requests. However, the cache grows with the number of servers your bot is in, so monitoring memory usage is essential for bots that serve many guilds.
Database choice significantly impacts performance for bots that store persistent data. SQLite works well for small to medium bots and requires no separate database server. For larger bots, PostgreSQL or MySQL provide better concurrency handling and more advanced query capabilities. Redis is excellent for caching frequently accessed data with automatic expiration.
Efficient event handling is crucial for bots that process high volumes of events. Only subscribe to the Gateway intents your bot actually needs, as receiving unnecessary events wastes bandwidth and processing time. Discord introduced privileged intents specifically to reduce the load of events like member updates and message content that most bots do not need.
Sharding becomes necessary when your bot reaches approximately 2,500 servers. Discord requires bots in more than 2,500 guilds to implement sharding, which distributes the bot across multiple Gateway connections. Most bot libraries support sharding natively, but it adds complexity to features that need to aggregate data across shards.
Monitoring your bot performance helps you identify issues before they affect users. Tracking metrics like response latency, memory usage, CPU utilisation, and error rates provides visibility into your bot health. Simple logging of command execution times can reveal slow commands that need optimisation.
Conclusion
Hosting a Discord bot successfully requires understanding the fundamentals of how bots connect to Discord, choosing the right programming language and hosting method for your needs, and following best practices for security and performance. Whether you are building a simple moderation bot for a small community or a feature-rich bot that serves thousands of servers, the principles covered in this guide provide a solid foundation for reliable bot hosting.
The most important factors in choosing a hosting solution are reliability, sufficient resources, and ease of management. Free hosting services like MonkeyBytes Hosting make it possible to deploy and run bots without financial barriers, while paid options provide additional resources for demanding workloads. Regardless of which hosting method you choose, keeping your bot token secure, your dependencies updated, and your code well-structured will ensure a smooth hosting experience.
Ready to host your Discord bot? Visit our getting started guide to learn how to deploy your first bot on MonkeyBytes Hosting, or explore our features page to see what the platform offers. If you have questions, check our FAQ or return to the home page to learn more about the service.