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

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

#171

I'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.

Overthinking it? Your solutions costs $240/year. There are solutions out there that would probably bring that under $20/year, and be more reliable than your VM that falls over when it's full of logs (at some indeterminate future date). 10x+ savings with greater reliability isn't "overthinking it", it's a greatly improved solution.

Cheapest linode is $5/month. Not sure why you'd need one that is $20/month

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

#172

I'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.

Even better that $20/month on linode is a GCP free tier instance. For this case, I bet it would be free.

https://cloud.google.com/free

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

#174
My scenario was triggering a Firebase backup once a day, but being to cheap to upgrade to the paid plan, that does it. (There also isn't an easy way to cap costs with Firebase). I actual backup is handled by a serverless function (in my case hosted by Vercel). There are other services that have somewhat generous free tiers, but be aware that those are usually quite restrictive on run time. For triggering the actual cron job I first tried Github Actions, but found it to be rather unreliable and ultimately settled for qstash by Upstash.

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

#176

I'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.

$20/mo is ... high. I run a commercial website (low volume) with a java app and mysql for about $6/mo on Digital Ocean.

And a few funsies "droplets" for that much that host my resume and other low volume, but open to internet, sites.

They all run cron.

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

#178
IFTT plus URLLooker would be like $12 a month. I would be tempted to use them instead if I made an average coder's salary, especially if it was for a client who didn't have anyone else who knew cron and scripting.

A VPS at hosthatch is still 4.99 I believe.

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

#179

I'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.

How much could a banana cost? $10?
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