[undefuser]

Can someone please enlighten me on what is the purpose of using an external Cron runner here? If I need to run the same job(s) for a long time, wouldn't it be simpler and cheaper to run a basic $5 VM on something like Linode?

[cube00]

The motivation is some of the "serverless" offerings may be near free if you are only firing this say once a day and the script is very fast to run.

[undefuser]

Yes maybe, however the guy said he wants to run once per hour. On top of that he will certainly need some form of persistence in order to do diff. Not to mention that some of the serverless solution suggested in other comments have short execution time limit, which if he happen to scan a large site, that would be insufficient. Yes maybe not everyone is willing to pay $5 per month, but in this case I think it strike a reasonable point between cost, speed, reliability and ease of use.

[update8887]

rely dislike those 5$ VM comments