erm some kind of control panel

What's your hosting? Do they have API? Worst case you'd need a script that's logging on their site, parses html and clicks the button, but that's very annoying and can easily break if they change their site, so not recommended.

But if they have cloud type feature where you are billed per hour they should have an api. If you link me to that I might be able to help

google cloud
https://cloud.google.com/

Oh derp I didn't realize you can run windows on google cloud. So yeah I think the guy had good idea. Setup small instance running forever that will start/stop the windows one. f1.micro costs about $4/month. Of course install linux on f1.
From there, install gcloud according to this guide https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gcloud-compute/ and make sure it can manage your instances. Eg. gcloud compute instances list should show both f1.micro and the windows one. Let's call it "windows-server". Add to crontab on your f1.micro:



(assuming gcloud is installed in /usr/local/bin. You might need to change that to wherever its installed to)
and that should be it.

before you do, what kind of disk do you have attached there? Because this is important to note:


If you have persistent disk it should be fine

This post was edited by nuvo on Feb 26 2017 04:39pm

ah so running an instance and having it run crontab is my best option and cheapest?

i believe the guy set it up with a ssd, should i have it redone with persistent disk instead?

I don't think you have SSD since you already start/stop it, albeit manually. But do check, maybe somewhere in billing it will show your resource usage - disk, network etc? It should state what kind of disk.
This matters for the windows vm obviously. Small instance shouldn't matter, worst case you need to reinstall gcloud and crontab

And well yes it is cheapest, unless you already have some other server running 24/7.

my windows vm is running ssd

the crontab is running pers disk

Well, huh. Is the windows one running any other disk next to ssd? Is there only one?

I wonder how are you able to start/stop it and keep data, with what google said above then.

yep, my windows serve is running on a ssd only
i can start, stop, restart and save all data
it's suppose to let me do that, isnt it? haha

Ah wait I know where's the confusion from. There are two types of SSD they offer. Local SSD, which will not let you restart server, only shutdown & delete and create new with it. Those are more like cache disks, or temporary disks. And then persistent disks can be either HDD or SSD. And local SSD cannot be used as boot disk, and every compute instance comes with persistent drive. Can you confirm that you have persistent SSD drive, and no local SSD?

In the meantime setup gcloud on the mini server