Why twelve? Serious question. At some point the comparison cost exceeds the savings. I track three. Hetzner for compute, OVHcloud for dedicated when I need it, RackNerd for cheap throwaway. Anything else I buy when I need it, not speculatively.
Member OP
Because I am broken person,,,,, Also because I resell small VPS to friends and the spread between providers matters at volume,,,,, If I can catch RackNerd at $10 vs HostHatch at $14 for same specs I make margin or I pass savings,,,,, Twelve because I started with three and kept finding edge cases
Ah, that explains the scale. Our price changes are usually promo led, we don't fiddle with base rates weekly. But promos are where the action is for your use case. No API for those, they go live when marketing says. Your scraper is probably the only way to catch the window.
Following this thread. I run similar setup for domain price tracking at a few registrars, problem is parallel. If anyone has a clean abstraction for "check this CSS selector and log the text" that works across sites I'd be interested. My current code is 80% copy-paste with different selectors.
What is a good beginner host for learning Linux? I saw Hostinger mentioned.
Already covered in the sticky. Short answer: Hetzner or a free tier. This thread is about price tracking tools, not recommendations. Read the sticky.
I wrote a small Go binary that does exactly what yingservers3 wants. Config file with URL, selector, interval. Outputs JSON or pushes to InfluxDB. Not pretty but it works. I can share the repo if there's interest, but warning: I am not a good Go programmer.
Yes please. Ugly working code beats beautiful imaginary code.
This thread moved from price tracking tools to scraper architecture to beginner hosting and back to scraper architecture. Typical. I'm just here to say I still use a Google Sheet with IMPORTXML and it breaks constantly but I can't be bothered to fix what is technically not broken, just fragile.
