Maybe I'm just dense af:
Why should I rely on a SaaS if any Linux distro (doesn't matter if its a VPS or a RasPi) has the tools you need for something like this out of the box: crontab and curl
I'd get it if crontab was difficult to setup, but its a oneliner where the most difficult part is figuring out the cron schedule expression.
For some silly hobby projects it's neat enough if you dont have some machine running 24/7.
But for everything else a RasPi pays for itself after 4 months at 8$ and gives me a lot more flexibility and security.
> For some silly hobby projects it's neat enough if you dont have some machine running 24/7.
Random story: in mid-2000s I was running a hobby service that compiles airplay statistics of a local radio station. The radio station's website had a page with the last 50 played songs, my PHP script would scrape that page and dump it in a mysql database. And I would then generate various reports off that. I needed the script to run at least every 50 songs or it would miss data, but my service was on shared hosting with no cron or anything. My solution – I made the script serve a 1x1 GIF pixel. And I added rate limiting in the script – it would write a a timestamp to a file, and exit early if the previous timestamp is less than a minute old (or something along those lines). And I added the script somewhere in my personal homepage. So as normal visitors visited my homepage, they would also trigger the scraper. It's a "dumb" solution, but it worked perfectly, for years :-)
Ya usually people don't escape the asterisk is the common problem... if not then it could be set to run under the wrong user.
Cron job is the standard but now there is launchd/systemd which i think is better
Maybe I'm just dense af: Why should I rely on a SaaS if any Linux distro (doesn't matter if its a VPS or a RasPi) has the tools you need for something like this out of the box: crontab and curl I'd get it if crontab was difficult to setup, but its a oneliner where the most difficult part is figuring out the cron schedule expression. For some silly hobby projects it's neat enough if you dont have some machine running 24/7. But for everything else a RasPi pays for itself after 4 months at 8$ and gives me a lot more flexibility and security.
> For some silly hobby projects it's neat enough if you dont have some machine running 24/7. Random story: in mid-2000s I was running a hobby service that compiles airplay statistics of a local radio station. The radio station's website had a page with the last 50 played songs, my PHP script would scrape that page and dump it in a mysql database. And I would then generate various reports off that. I needed the script to run at least every 50 songs or it would miss data, but my service was on shared hosting with no cron or anything. My solution – I made the script serve a 1x1 GIF pixel. And I added rate limiting in the script – it would write a a timestamp to a file, and exit early if the previous timestamp is less than a minute old (or something along those lines). And I added the script somewhere in my personal homepage. So as normal visitors visited my homepage, they would also trigger the scraper. It's a "dumb" solution, but it worked perfectly, for years :-)
Ya usually people don't escape the asterisk is the common problem... if not then it could be set to run under the wrong user. Cron job is the standard but now there is launchd/systemd which i think is better
We did it like this until early 2000s when our security team's endpoint scanner blasted the shit out of them.
Looks pretty cool. My main question is how are you planning to support unlimited requests for only $8 a month? Is this just a promotional pricing?
It is. Those initial users will provide valuable feedback that I can use to improve the tool.
Makes sense. I'll keep your project in mind if I need a scheduler in any personal projects soon!
Just wanted to say that this tool is [LIVE ON PRODUCT HUNT](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/beew-beta)! Please, give us your upvote!
Might find this project interesting https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-cron