Bot & Server Hosts#
See also
Inbestigator’s Hosting List, based off the original mega thread.
Attention
See Shared IP Warning before using anything serverless.
Knowledgebase#
Shared IP Warning#
Discord employs Cloudflare, amongst other methods, to limit bad requests on a per IP address basis. It’s highly recommended to read through their documentation on the matter.
This is important to understand because while services like Railway, Vercel, Netlify, and even AWS Lambda s are amazing pieces of technology, they do not guarantee the IP address. This means that you and 100 other developers could be using the same IP address, and if one of you exceeds the failed request threshold then it’s a Cloudflare IP ban for the entire IP and it means that you and all 100 other developers will be temporarily restricted.
If you’re encountering issues with rate limits and/or Cloudflare bans, your best bet is to get a VPS or server with a dedicated IP.
Identifying Scam Hosts#
If it’s too good to be true, it is. Compute is not free, electricity is not free. While hosts can offer it really cheap (OVHCloud has some as low as a couple USD a month), it’s never going to be free.
Never accept free hosting inside Discord#
You may get DMs or people offering to host your bot for free, these are almost always scams. They could be trying to hijack your bot token and take control of it or farm your code/data.
If it’s free, you’re the product#
While not true for every host, 99% of the ones we’ve seen come through this server are outright scams or summerhosts.
“Vibe coded” hosts#
These kinda hosts combine panels like Pterodactyl with a vibe coded website to try to quickly gain traction with zero effort.
Once you start seeing the common outputs from AI in terms of webdesign, you tend to spot them anywhere.
Common Software Scams Run#
Note
While none of these software on their own are bad, they can be indicative of a potential scam due to how common they or how they’re free/open-source.
WHMCS–Very common in the web hosting space for billing, customer management, and automation. Scam sites (and even some legitimate hosts) runs nulled/cracked copies of WHMCS which is obviously illegal and also a security risk. WHMCS runs a service that you can very any license yourself.
Pterodactyl / Pelican Panel–An open-source game control panel that is amazing software, however many scams or smaller hosting companies will use this panel to deploy “eggs” (Docker containers) as a service they sell. Other panels include: FeatherPanel.
Referral Systems#
These are not inherently bad, but people will try to use these systems to grow their scam or bad hosting service. You should always question the intent about someone recommending a service to you, especially if they’re smaller operations.
If you’re ever not sure about a link someone posts, then you can right-click (or press-and-hold) the message and click “Copy Text”. Markdown links will look as masked links which is a way people can try to hide bad links behind text that masks them.
Dedicated Discord Bot Hosting Services#
Some hosting companies offer specifically Discord bot hosting. This section is a factual breakdown of the realistic cost per GB of RAM and per CPU/vCPU compared to traditional hosting as well as providing lose cost/free alternatives that even some of those same hosts base their systems on.
Cost Calculations#
To make it fair, we’ll only account for RAM and CPU since everything else differs. We’ll provide that as a breakdown, provide information on the host, as well as any need to knows regarding IP addresses. For example if Hetzner provides 2vCPUs and 2GB of RAM for $5 a month (we’ll convert everything to USD) then we’ll assume 50% of cost is CPU and 50% of the cost is RAM. Which means it’s $1.25 per CPU and $1.25 per GB of RAM. There’s a lot more to the cost, yes, but for simplicity sake it’s easier to break it down this way.
Obviously companies charge a premium because they manage the resources, but we believe you should know the cost. If you manage the panels yourself you’ll get cheaper month to month, but you’ll spend time maintaining and updating…for many this is optimal trade-off for a low-cost solution. This also doesn’t account for how many bots you can run, some hosts will charge you per bot while VPS-based approaches do not restrict you past the purchased resource limits.
Baseline#
For simplicity we will take the median cost of entry level shared CPU VPS plans from Hetzner, OVHCloud, and Contabo; basically the hosts you’ll see heavily recommended. We’ll use USD, East-coast region pricing (as available). Most bot hosts that have been researched has usually gone up to only 8GB RAM, but for outliers we’ll also consider 12GB pricing. We will also be doing only monthly pricing excluding all sale costs as not every provider is running sales or offers annual options.
Also something to note: some places will use “xx% CPU” in their pricing. This is standard in cloud hosting space and 100% = 1vCPU, so 50% CPU = 0.5CPU.
Media costs per provider:
OVHCloud: $0.54 per CPU, $0.27 per GB RAM
Contabo: $0.64 per CPU, $0.33 per GB RAM
Hetzner (added the +$1.9 cost per IPv4 to total): $1.16 per CPU, $0.58 per GB RAM
Median overall cost:
CPU: $0.78 per
RAM: $0.39 per GB
Self-Hosting / Cloud Panels#
By far this is the best option, there’s plenty of self-hosted panels that are fantastic and can replicate a lot of what these dedicated hosts provide at a fraction of the cost (or completely free! You just pay for the server) and with no real limitations (besides resource usage). However the trade-off for free panel is you update it yourself.
Coolify Cloud, $5 per month for 2 servers
Dokploy, $4.50 per month for 1 server
Wisp, $5 per server per month (coming soon: a free option for personal use)
Verdict#
No matter what you choose, in most every case any combination of the above will always be cheaper than any dedicated Discord bot host.
Here’s some example configs compared to the highest tier plan on a bot hoster:
- Bot Host, $10/m:
3vCPUs, 7GB RAM, 100GB SSD, maximum 13 bots, low traffic IP (not dedicated IP)
- OVHCloud:
As you can see even accounting for the hosted panel cost and dedicated IP address (not shared) the median is $1.10 per CPU, $0.54 per GB RAM. Much lower than the hosts $1.66 per CPU, $0.71 per GB RAM for the plan.
Sparked Host#
Plan Pricing Breakdown#
Basic: $1 per CPU, $1 per GB RAM
Advanced: $1.33 per CPU, $1 per GB RAM
Advanced+: $1.81 per CPU, $0.66 per GB RAM
Ultimate: $1.66 per CPU, $0.71 per GB RAM
Median: - CPU: $1.50 per CPU, 92% above baseline - RAM: $0.85 per GB, 118% above baseline
It also appears that anything below Ultimate does not come with a low traffic IP and based on the help articles provided the cost of a low traffic is ~$1.69 a month and a dedicated is $7.93 a month (239% to 317% markup), Hetzner is $1.90 a month per additional with a $6 setup feee and OVH is $2.34 a month.
IP Address Limitation#
They use a pool of IP addresses that bots are proxied through. Quote from their own employee on how it works:
Each IP is limited to max 20 bots. If your bot gets rate limited, the support team will assign you a new IP address (usually within 10–30 minutes depending on the time of day).
This means that you could drop requests during any period of downtime. So be sure your library supports automatic retries and that you’re using some logging to ensure you’re capturing issues.
Features#
Pros:
Backups.
Provides MySQL databases.
Offers dedicated IPv4 addons, despite the over 200% markup.
Managed resources.
Cons:
IP address rotation still requires human intervention (CEO states its usually within a minute though).
The markup per CPU and GB is extremely high above baseline.
Limited language support (only Java, Python, and JavaScript).
Maintains support for long EOL’d language versions (Node v12 ended support April 2022).
Doesn’t support latest Node LTS versions (22, 24, 26), based on their FAQ.
IPv4 addon is almost $6 higher than standard hosting providers.
Source thread: Bot & Server Host Mega Thread
Thread OP: MatthewSH@github
OG Thread OP: Soheab@github