Creating a bot?

I’m pretty new to this and very curious about creating my own gtalk parrot bot. I was looking at the thread http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/26681 and managed to get the example by Chase to work.

But I want to know how I would be able to host a bot and keep it alive. Running it from my own computer wont be ideal so i was looking at options like Google App Engine.

Thanks in advance.