Hosting platforms

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
  • Hosting bots on Glitch
  • Botwiki starter projects on Glitch
• 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)
  • How To Set Up a Node.js Application for Production on Ubuntu 16.04 (digitalocean.com)
  • How to Deploy a Node.js App to DigitalOcean with a Free SSL Certificate (Video)
• 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:
  • Configuration and Config Vars
  • Intermediate Cron Jobs with Heroku
• Google Cloud Platform (Free Tier)
• PythonAnywhere: “Host, run, and code Python in the cloud!”
• AWS Lambda

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
• 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.