By name: background-worker description: Run a long-lived or 24-7 background worker in a cloud VM that won't auto-stop — queue workers, schedulers, bots, crawlers, or persistent agent loops. Disable auto-stop or set a TTL up to 30 days; the VM keeps its disk and IPv4 and resumes after a stop. Per-second flat pricing, ~10x cheaper than ephemeral sandboxes for steady-state work.
Background / 24-7 worker (Box)
Use this when work must keep running unattended: a queue worker, a Telegram/Discord bot, a polling agent, a scheduled scraper, or any always-on service. Ephemeral sandboxes (E2B microVMs, Codespaces) auto-die on a timer — wrong tool. A Box can be told to never auto-stop, persists its disk, and keeps a dedicated IPv4.
Why Box
- No session cap — runs hours/days/indefinitely.
- Persistent + resumable — disk survives stop;
box resumebrings it back. - Cheap steady-state — flat per-second pricing beats ephemeral providers (50 always-on VMs ≈ $432/mo vs ~$4k+).
Prereqs
curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh, then box login "$BOX_API_KEY" --json.
Recipe
box_id="$(box new --no-auto-stop --json | jq -r 'select(.event == "ready") | .id')"
box ssh "$box_id" -- bash -s < ./setup.sh
box ssh "$box_id" -- "cd /app && nohup ./worker.sh > /var/log/worker.log 2>&1 &"
box extend "$box_id" --ttl 2592000 # optional: 30-day deadline
Survival rules
Running processes do not survive stop/resume or fork — only the disk does. Make startup idempotent and relaunch after resume; use a process manager (systemd, pm2, nohup).
Limits
EU-only; disk-level snapshots; 100 active VMs soft cap; max 30-day TTL per extension (re-extend as needed).