Scheduling on shared hosting

Question

I'm in the process of writing a scheduling application on a shared hosting server. So far it doesn't look like my scheduling will have to be any more granular than daily, but that could change later. Ideally, I'll want to use a Windows host so I write my application in .NET but I'm open to using a PHP+*nix host.

In a shared hosting environment (read: cheap) how can I write an application where notifications can occur on a scheduled basis?

Answer 1

Are you wanting something like a cron job?

Steve

Answer 2

On a *nix system, you're going to want to use cron. An example of its use, starting a process every day at 3:20 AM:

echo "20 3 * * * /path/to/run-my-job.sh" | crontab

edit: To answer the question asked in a comment on another response, it depends on the shared host; many of them allow you to run cron jobs.