How to keep program running 24/7 without my computer being on?

[tjudg]

Hey guys, I have written a server and client using Qt. The server does web scraping from multiple websites and parses the data and uploads it to my website through ftp. The client gets the data from my website, parses it and posts information onto a widget.

All of it works but I have to keep my computer on 24/7 for the server to stay running. What I want to know is how do I make my program run 24/7 without my computer on? Do I need like a server to keep my program on? I've never done anything like this before so I have no idea what I need to make this work.

[raven-worx]

@tjudg said in How to keep program running 24/7 without my computer being on?:

What I want to know is how do I make my program run 24/7 without my computer on?

:D
Of course the machine (server) running an application needs to be running.
Get some little device like the RaspberryPi which uses way less power than a desktop machine, and let it up and running 24/7 acting as the server.

[VRonin]

@tjudg said in How to keep program running 24/7 without my computer being on?:

uploads it to my website

Since you already have a website, sometimes web hosts allow to run application on the web server, you'll probably be bound in how much CPU and RAM you can use though, check the features of the server you already have

[raven-worx]

to add up to @VRonin i would read the Terms and conditions of the webhoster before doing this.
Normally this is handled with the Fair-Use policy, which means the webhost can decide at any point to stop it when he thinks that you are influence other users and there are no defined limits.
This is mostly the case on (commonly used) shared webhosts, where you share the physical machine with other users.

Edit: actually this can already happen to you now. Depending on the load of data you are uploading to the webserver (24/7).

[SGaist]

Hi,

To add to my fellow, you might also want to consider consider a service like Heroku or an AWS instance.