Pandorabots has come a long way in the time I’ve been with them, and there have been several improvements since the February melt-down… questions answered, requests satisfied, friendly contact.  But, in spite of the gains, reliability remains an issue.  Pandorabots is down this morning… again.

I don’t know if it’s gone kaput and all of my bots are lost, or if they’re simply working on it, but the fact remains that it’s disappointing to get up in the morning, woof-down a bunch of caffeine while checking email and updating all the virus and malware stuff, only to find that when you’re ready to attack, the server doesn’t respond.

I’ve often been advised to find alternate hosting, but what might be suitable, and at the same time, free?  Any recommendations?

At this point, not really, since for right now, Pandorabots is “the only game in town” when it comes to AIML chatbot hosting (unless someone else knows of another option). Liz and I have talked about creating a Program O bot hosting service in the past, and the option is still “on the table”, but we won’t move forward with anything like that until version 3 has been fully tested in a production environment, which is still a long way off.

Do you currently host your bots on your own web site? Or is everything on the Pandorabots server?

Merlin - May 9, 2013:

Do you currently host your bots on your own web site? Or is everything on the Pandorabots server?

Everything is at Pandorabots, including the custom HTML pages.  They offer more reliable hosting for $75 a year, and while that’s not a great deal, something about it just doesn’t feel right—I feel like a second class citizen.  The current server is a lot better than the previous one, but how easy would it be to create issues with the server… slow it down a little… make it less reliable?  I’m not implying that Pandorabots is dishonorable in any way, but it’s no longer one guy toiling away in the garage by himself.  I think if they wanted to start charging for the service, they should charge new botmasters.