Would there be such a free PHP supporting server that would allow me perform this task?

Question

Hello everybody, I've already asked a few questions in this regard, but still have things that are not clear to me.

I was looking for a mechanism that, while being constantly run from a free remote server (which is not my computer), would check a web-page by its URL every 20 minutes, record its HTML code (i.e. source), store it in a file or send it to me by e-mail.

Well, I have already been told that this thing would be possible with Google Appi Engines, but I have just stumbled upon a PHP-supporting server and have discovered that PHP can do a lot of things that are very close to what I want to do.

So, my question is: do you think any free PHP supporting server would allow me that kind of task. (Do you know of any?) As far as I know, not all free PHP servers allow e-mailing.

Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

Any server that allows you to install your own cron jobs can do this. Just write a PHP script to do what you need and then set up a cron job to run that script at whatever interval you need (in this case I guess it would be every 20 minutes).

HOW to do this specifically would be a question to ask on ServerFault.

Answer 2

You could set up a cron job to run a PHP script that does just that. For example, the command in the cron job definition would be something like this

php /path/to/php-script.php

and the "php-script.php" file would look something like this

$fileAr = file("http://website-you-want-to-check/html-file");
$fileContentString = "";
for ($fileAr as $thisLine) {
$fileContentString .= trim($thisLine) . "\n";
}
mail("[email protected]","Website Source Code",$fileContentString,"From:  [email protected]");

This is obviously realy simplistic, but It'll do the job.

Alternatively, you could put the PHP script on a web server. If you're running Windows, you can use the Windows version of WGET to run the script remotely.

I should mention that you might need to modify some settings in your php.ini file (can't remember what ones off the top of my head though).