Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#1

Post by heywhatupboys » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

I thought this could start a good debate on the subject. Myself I have had to make a short running web-scraping job that, given a change in the site, sends a notifying email. This running once an hour.

It is 2022, so I had thought it would be tremendously easy and cheap, but it seems no solution is easily implemented.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#2

Post by warrenm » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

Sounds like a task for a cheap VPS

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#3

Post by iforgotpassword » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

Raspberry Pi at home if you don't have a home server already. Or some low spec cheap vps.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#4

Post by tcmb » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

Sounds like a job for serverless functions, e.g. in Azure [1], though I'm sure every hyperscaler has that. The Azure version even uses Cron syntax for the scheduling.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/func...

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#5

Post by holeyness » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:03 PM UTC

Aws Lambda

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#6

Post by malfist » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:04 PM UTC

AWS Lambdas could be used for this, you can trigger them on a time schedule using an event bridge.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#7

Post by oracle2025 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

warrenm wrote: post #2

Sounds like a task for a cheap VPS

Sometimes you get cron jobs with a cheap webhost, so you would not even need to maintain a cheap VPS

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#8

Post by codegeek » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

You can checkout https://cronhub.io (I run it). Behind the scenes, it wraps a lambda function with EventBridge (so you can set schedule) and adds other goodies like notifications/alert (slack/email etc), metrics, notifications if job runs slow etc.

Not free but basically you wrap your job in http endpoint and then we take care of the rest.

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#9

Post by dylan604 » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #6

AWS Lambdas could be used for this, you can trigger them on a time schedule using an event bridge.

what happens if the processing takes longer than 30s?

Re: Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

#10

Post by RegnisGnaw » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #9

malfist wrote: post #6

AWS Lambdas could be used for this, you can trigger them on a time schedule using an event bridge.

what happens if the processing takes longer than 30s?

The limit is now 30x that :)