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

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

#91

Post by s1k3s » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

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

You assume someone purchased hardware (preferably available anywhere on the planet), powered it up, set it up, connected it to the internet, then built the software to handle your very specific task, then put it online to do specifically what you want and for a close-to-free price? And you're shocked this doesn't exist?

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

#92

Post by naet » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

I set (and forgot) a Twitter bot a while ago that generates a randomized image and posts it,via GCP with a cron trigger twice a day. It hasn't cost me anything.

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

#93

Post by savrajsingh » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

Google App Engine, Google Cloud Tasks, free

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

#94

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by andrewmcwatters » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

https://visualping.io

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

#96

Post by tmpburning » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

[dead]

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

#97

Post by blueflow » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

You could configure crond to invoke it for you. Debian already has a cron.hourly facility for that rhythm.

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

#98

Post by ohadpr » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:55 PM UTC

I recently utilized Netlify for this. My build was actually my scraper and I used their Scheduled Functions (cron) to trigger this build every so often.

https://www.netlify.com/blog/how-to-schedule-deploys-with-ne...

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

#99

Post by drpixie » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

giaour wrote: post #58

ghufran_syed wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn’t the free tier only for one year?

No, you get some free usage in perpetuity

Or until they change the terms & conditions...

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

#100

Post by iforgotpassword » Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 10:58 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #85

dharmab wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A use case I've needed cloud services for is web scraping. Sites which IP ban web scrapers will still allow scraping from major cloud provider IP space.

How are sites detecting and banning once-an-hour users? Yes, if you want to spider an entire website continuously, you could get IP banned, but if you're making 24 (or even 96) requests a day to visit one site and check some data, your traffic is indistinguishable from baseline.

I've seen bigger sites block requests from ip ranges that belong to hosting providers. Don't know about cloud providers, but doing it from home with a residential address has the highest chances of success. You might still end up in the cloudflare verification page though sometimes.