It amazes me that for such a relatively simple thing everyone's knee jerk response is THE CLOUD!
Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
141–150 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#142Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#143I'm not sure what you mean when you say there is no easy solution... procure a small vm on Linode or your choice of provider for like $20/mo. SSH into it, set up the crontab to run your web scraping script. I could literally have that set up and running in 15 minutes flat. EDIT: after reading the other solutions in this thread I'm blown away by how much people are over thinking and over engineering this. KISS people.
Another tip is that Linode isn't the cheapest out there. I'm really happy with the pricing with Hetzner.
However, to your point on KISS, it's not really about that. Leaving a server on 24/7 is pretty cost ineffective if all you want to do is run a short job once a day.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#144GCP Cloud Run with a schedule set to call the HTTP endpoint once an hour. Cloud Run will run any docker image, and give it a HTTPS URL. Scales to zero, allows running in the background for up to an hour. The benefit over FAAS is that you can run anything you want in the container, including multiple processes.
I love Cloud Run, but can they please tie these two things together for me? It's a radio button that says "On schedule" and an input for the cron syntax.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#145There are plenty of budget VPS hosts out there where you can get something for good but they are good enough. Check out lowendbox.com.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#146I'm not sure what you mean when you say there is no easy solution... procure a small vm on Linode or your choice of provider for like $20/mo. SSH into it, set up the crontab to run your web scraping script. I could literally have that set up and running in 15 minutes flat. EDIT: after reading the other solutions in this thread I'm blown away by how much people are over thinking and over engineering this. KISS people.
I use AWS Lightsail for a similar task, the node is pretty slow but it's only $5/month.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#147Retool Workflows is the way to go https://retool.com/products/workflows (see the 4 min demo on their site) Flexibility to write custom code and alerting logic, but no headache of managing your own infrastructure Disclaimer: I previously worked at Retool :)
Retool Workflows PM here. Thanks for the mention. We just launched in beta and would love any feedback. You can authenticate to your DBs/APIs, write any logic in code and then schedule it or trigger from a webhook. We also price on data throughput (not tasks/steps/etc) so you can use it economically for large jobs. Ping me a note on jamie@retool.com if you give it a try https://retool.com/products/workflows
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#148CDK / Lambda / EventBridge
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#149There's Apify for this exact use-case, their free credits combined with the pay-as-you-go pricing should be a suitable solution.
Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?
#150I'm not sure what you mean when you say there is no easy solution... procure a small vm on Linode or your choice of provider for like $20/mo. SSH into it, set up the crontab to run your web scraping script. I could literally have that set up and running in 15 minutes flat. EDIT: after reading the other solutions in this thread I'm blown away by how much people are over thinking and over engineering this. KISS people.
It's reasonable to call this the "easiest" way. It's certainly not the "cheapest, easiest" way, which is what the poster asked for.
Many of the other options listed in this thread are free or within a rounding error of free. Some of them equally are not the "cheapest, easiest" because they're complex. But some of them pretty clearly meet both criteria (GitHub Actions comes to mind), and some of them might meet the criteria depending on what somebody has familiarity with (if you're already used to deploying code to any FaaS provider with a free tier, that'll likely be the cheapest/easiest way).