Blog
2026-08-31
How to host your Discord bot 24/7
A Discord bot has to be online whenever someone in the server pings it, which rules out the usual student-hosting trick of sleeping when nobody is visiting: nobody visits a bot over HTTP. It needs a plan that never sleeps.
That plan is Awake, ₹249 a month, not the ₹99 Nap plan the rest of the site leads with: Nap exists to save money by sleeping between visitors, and a bot has no visitors to sleep between. Awake also restarts the process on its own if it crashes, so one unhandled promise rejection at 2am does not take the bot down until you notice.
Step by step
- Push the bot to GitHub. Node.js (discord.js) and Python (discord.py) are detected and built automatically.
- Sign in to the dashboard with GitHub, press New app, name it, and choose Awake, not Nap.
- Paste the repository URL and branch, then press Create and deploy.
- Open Environment and add DISCORD_TOKEN (or whatever your code calls it). Read it from the environment, never hard-code it.
- A bot has nothing to listen on, so skip binding to the PORT variable; that step is for web apps.
- Watch Live logs after the first deploy for the client's login confirmation, then invite the bot to a server.
- If it crashes later, Live logs shows the stack trace, and the process restarts on its own without you doing anything.
Every step above is a control that exists in the dashboard today. The docs go further: custom domains, backups, rolling back a bad deploy, and what to read when a build fails.
Ready to try it? Sign in with GitHub and put 30 days of DormHost credit in your balance, no card required. This needs Awake, ₹249 a month afterwards: it has to stay running, and Nap would put it to sleep.