I've been running a simple Python scraper on a Debian box at work, nothing fancy. BeautifulSoup + requests, dump to SQLite. The trick is rotating User-Agent and adding jitter to the cron timing so you don't look like a bot. Not that I think any of these hosts care, but why invite trouble.
For price history visualization I just dump it into Grafana. Overkill for home but we already run it.
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If you want clean, put it on a real host not your basement. Network from Rotterdam to most of these DCs is stable. I run similar from a Hetzner VM in Falkenstein — https://www.hetzner.com/cloud — costs me nothing against what I save catching price drops.
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I have a Hetzner auction box in Nuremberg actually,,,,, The Pi is just where it started and inertia is powerful,,,,, Maybe time to migrate the cron there,,,,, Still hoping someone says "just use X service" and I can stop maintaining this entirely
I used to use camelcamelcamel for server stuff but they dropped most of the hosts years ago. Now it's just Amazon price tracking. Shame, it was clean.
There is no good hosted service for this. I looked. The closest is something like Visualping or Distill.io but those are page change detectors, not price extractors. You still get diff spam when they change a banner image. Fine for "did it change" useless for "what is the history."
Build your own or pay someone to build it. Those are the options.
This. No service. Scrapers break. Hosts change layout. Accept maintenance or accept no data.
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I don't understand half of what you are all talking about but I pay Hostinger £2.99 a month for my bakery site and I just want to know if I am overpaying. Is there a simple way to check? I don't know what cron is.
You're on shared hosting, different world. Your price is probably promotional first-term. Check what it renews at. Hostinger is cheap for year one, less cheap at renewal. That's the trick most of us are tracking.
I just use the free tier alerts from OVHcloud and Hetzner themselves. Not history, just "notify me when this is available." Good enough when you run free stuff and pray anyway.
ZFS on my storage VPS at Hetzner, CX51 plan. Been stable at EUR 8.21 for a year. No price change to track. The real cost is the storage box at EUR 10.81 for backups, also flat. Maybe I pick boring providers.
