Who runs this, and how it stays free.

Who runs it

Silly Development is operated by an individual sole trader in the United Kingdom. There is no company behind it, no investor, and no team.

How to reach the operator about privacy and data requests is set out in the privacy policy.

How free hosting gets paid for

Advertising on this website covers the hardware. That is the entire arrangement, and it is worth being specific about what it does not involve.

Your project is not throttled to push you toward the paid plan, and nothing is held back for it: the paid plan sells more of the same resources, not features withheld from the free tier. We do not sell your data. There is no renewal button and no expiry timer, because those exist to reclaim capacity from people who forgot to click something, not to help you. The one clean-up we do run is narrower: a server that was never used at all in the week after it was created is removed so somebody else can have the room, normally with a warning email first.

There is an optional paid plan for projects that outgrow 256 MB, so they have somewhere to go without leaving. It does not come out of the free tier: that keeps the same CPU, memory, disk and uptime, still paid for by the advertising on this site. If that ever changes, we will say so here rather than let you find out yourself.

What we are not

We host small, long-running programs: bots, web apps and APIs, background workers, scheduled scripts, anything that needs to stay running without a machine of your own switched on. Bots are what we write the most about, for Discord, Minecraft, Telegram, Twitch, Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter and WhatsApp, but the server does not know or care what your code does or who it talks to — what it runs is Node.js, Python or Bun.

We are not a general VPS and not a game server host. A web app runs here at an address and port rather than behind a domain we manage for you, which suits a small site or an API and does not suit anything serving video or large downloads. The Minecraft pages are about the bot that logs into a world, never the world itself. Three runtimes are supported and that list is short on purpose: three that are installed and tested beat ten that are listed and neglected.

A bit of history

An earlier version of this service was taken down on purpose when it could no longer keep up, rather than left to degrade until people lost projects without warning. What runs now was rebuilt from the ground up, with a panel that is a different piece of software from the one before.

The allocation is deliberately modest and deliberately fixed: 25% of a CPU core, 256 MB of memory, 512 MB of disk. A free tier that promises more than the hardware can deliver is how the last one got into trouble.