Appropriate hosting for a custom application that needs to run every 30 minutes?

[SiD the Turtle]

As some of you may be aware, I run a small website that tracks Xbox Live gamerscores for people in the Console Games and Hardware sub-forum.

This is done by running a C# application I developed that grabs a web page from the Xbox site and then scrapes the information I need from it. The problem is I can only run it when I am there to press run and leaving my PC on all day is not an option. Therefore the data there becomes quickly out of date.

I was thinking I either need a host that will let me run the program on their box at a set interval or perhaps create a smaller tool in whatever language is appropriate to the server which just does the page grabbing bit every thirty minutes and FTP/emails me the files so that I could run the program once a day, but have the data for a whole day loaded in.

Any ideas on the best way of going about this at the cheapest price possible? Hiring a whole server for this is too much money for what I want to do.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

OS? you may be able to get away with a vps

C# means .Net 2.0 and therefore Windows, but if I just want to run the bit that grabs the pages then I could go with whatever.



Edit: Hmmm what about a host that would let me run WGET, CURL or similar.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Hmm that sounds like an interesting idea. Thanks for that I might look into it.

My host is *nix based but I don't have access to Cron on my package. I might try setting up a Linux test box and having a play.

 

[SiD the Turtle]

PHP idea

ASP.NET idea

Both fantastic ideas chaps. One major stumbling block I'm aware of on PHP (and I'm betting in .NET as well) is execution timeouts. The processing of almost 400 pages of info completes in just a few seconds on my desktop machine but the whole process can take up to 15 minutes due to the delay requesting the almost 400 source pages from gamercard.xbox.com, which isn't the fastest site in the world.

Still, more things to look into.