I've created an app that goes out and fetches data and then processes it in batches, triggered via cron jobs. The app has no web front end, it just stores data in a DB to which I connect from my localhost and then run some analysis on said data.
The work it does (fetching data and processing it) will only run about 6 hours a day and the rest of the time the app will be completely idle. While it's running I'll need about 512MB of RAM.
I'm looking for a good hosting solution to run this app. Would "cloud" services be more appropriate / cost effective than a shared host or VPS? Obviously I'm looking for the "pay by the hour" model but in a chat with rackspace support they told me "you still pay for the monthly costs since the storage is persistent and the only thing you would not be paying for is the bandwidth".