I’ve wanted to downgrade the VPS this website is hosted on to one of the cheaper options as I don’t use most of what I’m paying for. Problem is, Frantech/BuyVM always seems to be out of their $2/month servers. I was manually checking every few days, but decided if I really wanted one of these cheaper options I’d have to automate this task.
I consulted my local LLM for library reccomendations and example usage.
gpt-oss put me on BeautifulSoup, which worked flawlessly. I don’t like
directly using code LLM’s generate for projects like this since I don’t feel
like I learn as much that way.
I wrote an MVP, just checked the availability of a single region. Shortly after
implementing that, I decided it’d be worth checking each region by iterating
over the result of BeautifulSoup’s select function.
At this point I was ready to just put the stdout in my status bar, but I’m not at my computer all the time. Decided in that case it’d be better to send a notification to my phone. I wanted to use SMS but quickly changed my mind, not that it couldn’t be done, rather there is a solution that felt simpler that my brother pointed me to: a project called ntfy. It’s a straightforward (and optionally self-hostable) notification “server” that uses HTTP POST to publish messages to a “topic” (url).
I set up a systemd user timer service to execute this script on each hour of the day. I assume this is frequent enough. Not trying to get deny-listed by Frantech.
I like (and usually prefer) the simplicity of cron jobs, but wanted to log the results to the journal.
I’m saving a grand total of $18/year, which really isn’t much, but writing the scraper was fun and I got to get some hands on experice with a new python library, BeautifulSoup. Now I’ve been thinking about new projects I can take on with these new skills.