I'm writing a website that will be hosted on a shared hosting environment. As a consequence, I won't have any access to things such as the task scheduler. The website needs to perform various checks on a half-daily basis. What is the best way of firing these tasks in this scenario?
The best two things I could think of where:
- Fire the process every time a user hits my site - perform some sort of check to see when the process last ran, and if it's greater then 12 hours run the process.
- Have some hidden page that runs the processes and then get some external entity to ping this page at 12 hour intervals.
Both methods seem a bit ropey?