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by sph 816 days ago
In a much smaller scale, I'm working on a web crawler as well, and renting a dedicated server at Hetzner with unlimited traffic is cheaper than any VPS, or cloud offering.

8 cores, 32 GB RAM, 2x 500 GB SSD for ~€40/month — it's an older CPU but web crawlers don't spend too much time crunching numbers anyway.

1 comments

What crawling framework you using?
In-house made in Elixir.

20% of a crawler is fetching and parsing pages, the remaining 80% is dealing with misconfigured, broken and non-standard web servers and HTML. Dealing with Cloudflare, Akamai and random bot-busting tools that cause more false positives than a chaos monkey. It's better to write one yourself that you can control, monitor and operate as you need, instead of relying on third-party logic. Makes sense for my business, at least.

Ah. Have so been there. But don’t really have the resources to spin something from 0. Good luck!!