I too found the barwen.sh offer interesting. I only came upon this thread last night and am still thinking about what exactly I could use such an account for but the price point is certainly very interesting.

Would it be okay to run an IRC bot?

Maybe even one that does nothing other than keep a #channel in existence and op the "real" bots of the channel whenever they come back online. (A placeholder bot not one that people chat to etc.)

-MarkM-