Short answer
- Free and webhook-based: Cloudflare Workers. 100,000 requests per day on the free plan is far more than most bots receive. Requires writing the bot for Workers (see our template).
- Easiest always-on: Railway. Connect GitHub, set BOT_TOKEN, done. Hobby is $5/month including $5 of usage.
- Cheapest always-on with full control: Vultr from $5/month for 1 GB (Mexico City region available) or Fly.io from $2.19 per 30 days for a 256 MB machine.
Comparison table
| Host | Long polling 24/7 | Webhook | Entry price | Free option | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers | No | Yes | $0; Paid $5/mo | 100k requests/day, 10 ms CPU each | Medium (Workers runtime) |
| Railway | Yes | Yes | Hobby $5/mo incl. $5 usage | Free plan: $1/month of usage; trial $5 for 30 days | Low |
| Fly.io | Yes | Yes | $2.19 per 30 days (256 MB) | No free tier; short trial | Medium (CLI, fly.toml) |
| Vultr | Yes | Yes | $5/mo (1 GB); $3.50 (0.5 GB) | No | High (you run Linux) |
| DigitalOcean | Yes | Yes | $4/mo (512 MiB); $6 (1 GiB) | Promotional credits sometimes | High |
| Hetzner Cloud | Yes | Yes | Not verified (see site) | No | High |
| Render | Paid worker only | Yes; free web sleeps after 15 min | $7/mo (512 MB) | Free web service, spins down | Low |
| Oracle Cloud Always Free | Yes | Yes | $0 | 2 AMD micro VMs or Arm A1 up to 2 OCPU / 12 GB | High; capacity errors and idle reclamation |
Prices verified on 2026-10-19 on the linked official pages. They change: check before you buy.
How we judged
A Telegram bot with long polling needs one process that never sleeps; two processes with the same token conflict. A webhook bot only needs an HTTPS endpoint that answers quickly, which serverless handles well. We ranked by: does it fit the mode, monthly cost for a small bot, how much you must administer, and surprises (sleeping, reclamation, usage billing).
Caveats worth knowing
- Render's free web services spin down after 15 minutes without inbound traffic and take about a minute to wake: acceptable for a low-traffic webhook, not for polling.
- Oracle may reclaim Always Free instances that stay under 20% CPU, network and (A1) memory use for 7 days, and new instances can fail with 'out of host capacity'.
- Usage-billed platforms are cheap when idle, but a memory leak costs money. Set limits.
Filter all of these interactively in the hosting comparator, or follow the grammY tutorial.