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?

#241

Post by midasz » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:40 AM UTC

james2doyle wrote: post #162

I feel like maybe this problem was "solution first". A cronjob is a solution. For example, Supabase supports cronjobs, but it can't be used to take screenshots. This might be a non-answer, but if you just want "scheduled notifications of a website change", then you can use something completely purpose built for that. There is a Github action that does exactly this: https://github.com/yasoob/github-action-scraper-tuto…

You've also got changedetection.io ->(https://lemonade.changedetection.io/start), which can be selfhosted on a pi etc. I've used it myself to snipe the cheapest kimsufi server.

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

#242

Post by shlosky » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:42 AM UTC

Lambda function, scheduled by eventbridge

the simplest and cheapest

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

#243

Post by remh » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:43 AM UTC

If that's all you need checklyhq.com (not affiliated with them) free plan should do it!

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

#244

Post by jsemrau » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:48 AM UTC

As someone who always missed failing cronjobs, I am using Airflow with Slack integration. I.e., every time the job finishes, I get a message. If the job fails, I also get a message.

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

#245

Post by rtcoms » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:51 AM UTC

Try Pythonanywhere. Currently, I'm using this to run a trading bot.

Cost min $5 per month and then additional $1 for each additional task

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

#246

Post by undefuser » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:53 AM UTC

Can someone please enlighten me on what is the purpose of using an external Cron runner here? If I need to run the same job(s) for a long time, wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper to run a basic $5 VM on something like Linode?

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

#247

Post by santiagobasulto » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:55 AM UTC

byproxy wrote: post #224

hackermeows wrote: post #210

If you are comfortable using AWS , You could us AWS Batch (free) with Spot Fargate jobs with Cloudwatch cron as the trigger . You only pay for the vcpu hours your job consumes https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/pricing/ , it’s a set it up once and forget it model. You could use lambda if your runtime is expected to always be less than 15 minutes Batch fargate jobs documentation - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/batch/latest/…

AWS’s Chalice framework also offers a high-level way to declare these scheduled functions (amongst other things): https://aws.github.io/chalice/

Haven't used Chalice, I've heard good things.

I use Zappa and it's great.

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

#248

Post by CipherThrowaway » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 7:59 AM UTC

I've had good experiences with Google Cloud Scheduler. https://cloud.google.com/scheduler

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

#249

Post by kmac_ » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 8:01 AM UTC

I run my cronjobs on OpenWRT router. It's turned on all the time anyway, so it's for free :)

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

#250

Post by hagbarth » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 8:09 AM UTC

akerl_ wrote: post #150

fourseventy wrote: post #137

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.

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 cr…

As one of the sibling comments points out, you could set this up on a GCP free tier VM.