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What do you use for monitoring stock on sold-out budget plans?

Deals & Offers by tinaworm 17 replies 1.6K views
marcus_qc

Member

#11

@tinaworm As someone who resells to people who panic when their plugin update breaks: consider what happens when your script fires at 3am, you buy the instance half-asleep, and the confirmation email goes to spam.

I have a client who automated Hetzner auction alerts. Bought a server with no SSD, just HDD. Took him two days to notice. "Price was good" he said.

If DNS is truly secondary, maybe just set a calendar reminder to check manually every Tuesday. Their restocks often hit on weekday morning EU time.

42U and still growing
everks

Member

#12

Slow reply as promised.

I run similar check for HostHatch Sydney stock. I use curl with --etag-compare to save their bandwidth and my own. Returns 304 most of the time, no body to parse.

They do not seem to mind. Six months, no ban. Fifteen minute interval.

@pauloserver Your friend with 30 second check: was this HostHatch or another provider? Some are more trigger happy than others.

bellaauc

Member

3-2-1 Believer

#13

@tinaworm You never answered my RTO question with a number. "Whenever I notice" is not a number.

But fine. You want practical: if you log to file, rotate them. My first stock checker filled a 20GB VPS with logs because I forgot logrotate. The irony of monitoring tool killing the host.

Also test your notification path. I once had a script that "worked" for months but SMTP password expired. I only found out when I actually needed the alert.

3-2-1 or you're already dead
tinaworm

Member OP

#14

@kate3 Hetzner is 4 EUR which is over 4 USD. Also I already have HostHatch credit from a referral. I would lose 17 dollars if I switch.

@reykjavik_doc span with id is good idea. I will inspect their page again. Last time I looked it was all generated by javascript, no useful ids.

@everks etag-compare is clever. I did not know curl could do that.

worst bandwidth, best stories
HE

Member

#15

This.

olespete

Member

Trust No One

3 #16

You people are checking stock with scripts that log in? Or just hitting public pages?

If you are not logging in, you are just another scraper. If you are logging in, rotate your keys. I have seen accounts suspended for "automated access" in ToS, not just IP bans.

Port 22 open to world is bold. Scraping without reading ToS is bolder.

airgapped, encrypted, faraday'd, still worried
DE

Member

#17

@tinaworm Did you try emailing their sales? I got put on a waitlist for Oslo stock once. Took two weeks but they notified me directly. No script needed.

Might not work for budget plans though. Worth a sentence in an email.

tinaworm

Member OP

#18

@deer_goat I emailed them day three. No response. Maybe sales ignores 3.50 customers.

@olespete Public page only. No login. I read ToS, it says "no excessive automated requests" which is vague. Fifteen minutes seems reasonable.

@bellaauc You win. I will set up logrotate before I run anything.

Going with: 15 minute curl, etag if it works, grep for button text, systemd timer, log to file with rotation, email to myself. Thank you all.

If anyone wants my script after I clean it up I will post in tutorials section.

worst bandwidth, best stories

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