easy scheduling without cron

Hi, my server doesn't allow shell access or scripts. What's the easiest way to schedule a script, from within ruby/rails?

I need to schedule a script to scrape search results and store to a database once per day.

I've googled but some of the solutions seemed overly complex, there should be a simple way to do this right?

Thanks

Alex

Get a new host that doesn't suck. Seriously, VPS hosting is crazy cheap nowadays and doesn't have bizarro restrictions like "no shell access".

I'm not sure what else is an option - the issue is that the whole Rails stack is centered on serving requests, and there's not really a way to say, "wait for this till time X". There are a number of "Ruby cron"-type things, but they all ultimately rely on a real attachment to cron - or they require persistent daemon processes, which I suspect your current host doesn't allow *either*...

--Matt Jones

+1

But if you're stuck where you are, you can use a "webcron" service to periodically make a request to an action on your server, which then fires off the process. So have a controller call "WebCron" with actions like "calculate_stats" and call http://your.url/web_cron/calculate_stats