Hello.
I am sure this might not be the best category, but the help category wouldn’t let me post a topic there, so I figured this was the next best place.
I am wondering, does anyone have their bots hosted on any sort of service? If so, what service, how much does it cost, why do you like it, etc.?
I am looking for good options to host a node.js Twitch/Discord bot I have coded, one for me, one for a client, and am trying to find the best option.
We both have considered just running them locally, but we both would like to find a way to offload the processing to another machine.
I have heard of things such as AWS Lambda but I was very confused by some of their wording and am unsure if it would work effectively for me.
Thanks for any suggestions.
If this is in fact the wrong category, please feel free to redirect me to the proper place to post this.
I am using a dedicated server which emulates VMs, but you can get only VMs for a very cheap monthly price, like £2.
It depends of course of your language, if you are doing a bot in a windows-only available language, well, you’ll need a Windows server and prices are way higher, but if it’s a NodeJS bot, it will be very cheap for sure. Java too, but beware of the RAM available on the VM as Java is very consuming.
My advice is to benchmark your app, see what resources it requires and then look around at various hosting providers and see which provide the best fit for your needs.
Lamda is not what you want if you intend to have the app run for more than 5 minutes consecutively, or if it will need more than 1.5gb of memory. Lambda is designed for small, contained code snippets that don’t take long to run.
Ec2, or hosting your application on the beanstalk would allow it to run 24/7, or during a schedule you specify.
Most bots, if they are just an irc connection that monitors chat and responds to a single users channel are pretty safe to run from an ec2 nano or micro – you may need a beefier instance if you’re doing data storage and analytics, or providing web services - you won’t know until you measure resource requirement.
Things to just keep track of is your bandwidth that you send out, storage space requirements, cpu, and RAM. All of these items will cost you money if you go the ec2 or beanstalk route.
I also have a twitch bot, but it’s with python… And it run on a raspberry, it’s for me the cheaper way to host. And, I haven’t tested, but I believe that the raspberry can run nodeJS… I’ve tested with the raspberry pi 3 and the pi zero, and it works… It’s mean that for 20 or 50 you have a machine to host your bot… It’s depends which raspberry and how much storage you want… But you pay only once hope I bring you back to a local machine
The issue with that is that it only works on MY bot, or I would also need to tell my clients to buy one of these.
Not everyone is experienced in Linux, and trying to explain to one of my clients how to set up a raspberry pi from scratch and install everything on it would be a nightmare.
What you’re looking for is a virtual private server (VPS). Linode, Digital Ocean, OVH, and Vultr are all examples of providers. You can get a server with 10GB SSD, 2GB ram, Intel CPU, and 1Gbps connection for as little as $3.49 USD / month.
I am running a node instance which is constantly connected to ~100 Channels (around 400k messages per day) on my testing server from OVH (smallest, 2GB RAM, 1 Core).
The nodeJS bot only consumes around 2% of CPU resources and ~5% RAM.
To expand about openshift above. Its not just nodejs; thats simply what OP asked for. They will host a variety of platforms including but not limited to nodejs, python, java, perl, and ruby. You get 3 ‘gears’ where each gets 1 process environment, 512mb of ram and 1gb of disk space but you can combine the gears as needed; to a max(for the free account) of 1 process environment with 1.5gb ram and 3gb of diskspace.
The drawbacks of the free account are:
No customer service or access to offical support forums short of you completely borking your environment. There are plenty of 3rd party resources available if you need assistance.
If your website/app isn’t accessed from an outside source at least once a day its put into an ‘idle’ state. This is easy to work around by setting up a remote site pinger.
hope I bring you back to a local machine 