You have quite a few options when it comes to hosting your bots.
- Self-hosted
- General botmaking platforms
- Hosting your Twitter bots
- Hosting your Mastodon bots
- Hosting your Slack bots
Self-hosted¶
- Glitch: the easiest way to build the app or bot of your dreams
- DigitalOcean: a popular VPS (Virtual Private Server), starts at $5/month (it’s also used to host this site; our referral link gets you $10 starter credit)
- OpenShift: a PaaS, comes with a free plan, but a credit card verification is required to prevent your app from sleeping when inactive
- Heroku: similar to OpenShift with free “Dyno hours” and a scheduler. See also:
- Google Cloud Platform (Free Tier)
- Linode: another VPS, starts at $10/mo
- Dreamhost: web hosting and domain name registrar, their VPS starts at $15/month
- PythonAnywhere: “Host, run, and code Python in the cloud!”
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AWS Lambda
- Claudia Bot Builder (GitHub): Create chat bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Amazon Alexa, Skype, Telegram, Viber, GroupMe, Kik and Twilio and deploy to AWS Lambda in minutes
General botmaking platforms¶
- Dexter: a platform that makes connecting third-party APIs easy
- BOT libre!: create your own chat bot with real artificial intelligence, share it, embed it, connect it to the world
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IFTTT: helps your apps and devices work together
- Flow XO: connect your cloud apps together into automated workflows
Twitter¶
- Cheap Bots, Done Quick!: see tutorials and examples of bots created with CBDQ
- Google Apps Script: see Bradley Momberger‘s blog for more details
- tilde.town (Twitter and IRC bots)
- @beaugunderson is offering to let people host bots on his Linode account
- you can even use your Raspberry Pi
Mastodon¶
- Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet!: This site will help you make a Mastobot, much like CBDQ for Twitter bots
Slack¶
- Slack.Pipe: allows you to create custom bots from any API
See also: Hosting Slack Integrations on the Slack API Developer Blog.
