I’m working on a telegram bot project and need help with deployment. I’ve been using the python-telegram-bot library and got my bot running perfectly on my local machine. Now I want to deploy it to run continuously without keeping my computer on all the time.
I tried a few different hosting options but I’m not sure which one is the most straightforward for beginners. Some people mentioned Heroku while others suggested VPS hosting or cloud platforms.
What would be the simplest approach to get my bot running 24/7 online? I don’t need anything fancy, just something reliable that won’t break the bank. Any step-by-step guidance would be really helpful since I’m pretty new to deployment stuff.
GCP’s free tier works great for telegram bots. I’ve run mine there for 8 months without paying anything. The Always Free VM handles most bot stuff just fine, and setup’s easier than it looks. Just spin up a compute engine instance, install what you need, and create a systemd service so your bot restarts automatically. Best part? You get full VM control - install any Python packages you want. Don’t forget to set up firewall rules properly, and maybe run screen or tmux as backup if the service dies. Their docs look scary but the Python quick start guides are solid.
For beginners, check out PythonAnywhere or DigitalOcean’s App Platform. PythonAnywhere’s super straightforward - it’s built for Python apps and has a solid free tier that’ll handle basic bots. Just upload your files and tweak a few settings through their web interface. DigitalOcean’s App Platform is a bit more advanced but still beginner-friendly with great docs. Pricing’s transparent and you get more resource control than other platforms. Both handle server management so you won’t deal with Linux admin stuff or maintenance headaches. Before deploying, make sure your bot has proper error handling and logging - debugging remote issues is way trickier than local dev. Also switch to webhook mode instead of polling if you haven’t yet. It’s much more efficient for hosted setups.
railway or render are def better than heroku now - solid free tiers n auto deploy from github. just ensure requirements.txt & maybe a dockerfile. they generally detect python projects n handle setup easily, no biggie.