GuidesOnly show guides for your app
GuidesGuidesHow the free session timer really works, why uptime pingers don't help, and the difference between a crash, a timeout, and a script that simply finished.
Here's the honest version of the question every free user asks: how do I keep my server running? The answer has a few parts, and some of the advice you'll read elsewhere on the internet doesn't actually apply to Falix. Let's clear it up.
A free Falix server runs on a session timer. While the timer has time on it, your server runs. When it reaches zero, the server stops — cleanly, on purpose. That's the trade for free hosting: the machines are shared, so free servers don't run unattended forever.
You extend the timer yourself on the server's Timer page. You'll solve a quick captcha, and each extension adds hours back onto the clock, up to a cap. Most of the time an extension gives you your plan's full chunk of hours. Either way, you can come back and extend again.
🎯 Good to know: When the node your server is on is low on memory, an extension might be as short as +1 hour — that's the system sharing limited resources around.
🎯 Good to know: Running a game server (Minecraft, Terraria…) rather than an app? Free game servers follow extra rules on top of the timer — a Minecraft server auto-stops about 10 minutes after the last player leaves, and an unreachable server is stopped after a grace period. Free-plan gaming has the details.
⚠️ Heads up: Uptime-pinger services do not keep a Falix server online.
This one trips everyone up. Those tools work by sending web requests to keep a sleeping app awake on certain other hosts. Falix's timer isn't a sleep-on-idle timer — it's a session clock — so pinging your app's URL does nothing to it. The only way to add time is the Timer page.
If you need a bot or site that's always up — no captcha, no clock — that's what premium is for. A premium server has no session timer at all; it runs 24/7, with your plan's own memory and CPU. Everything else about how your app works is identical to free.
When your server goes offline, it's one of these — and telling them apart is half the battle:
| What happened | Is it a crash? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The timer ran out (free only) | No — the session ended, nothing's wrong with your code | Extend it and start again |
| Your program finished | No — a script that does its job and returns exits normally | Nothing, if it wasn't meant to keep running |
| It crashed | Yes — an error was thrown, or it was killed for memory | Read the Console from the top |
Long-running things (a web server, a Discord bot) stay up because they keep waiting for connections or events. If your app "won't stay online", first check whether it's actually a program that's meant to keep running. A real crash leaves evidence in the console — see When your server won't start and Out of memory.