I have been a satisfied customer of Winhost for a few months now. The only feature I found missing so far is the support for scheduled tasks (like cron jobs on a unix-like OS). If you think this feature is good to have, please vote by replying. If enough people vote, Winhost may decide to introduce this rather sooner than later. Thanks!
Thanks for the input. I will surely bring it up with our management team on our weekly meetings. By all means anyone who wants this feature please voice it out.
I don't have any immediate need for it -- but I have in the past, and it does open some possibilities for the future. So add my vote to the 'Yea' column.
Yes, scheduled jobs would be fantastic. I know it can be difficult for shared hosts to provide the ability for customers to drop windows services and other common scheduling methods on their systems. The other problem is that if you have a scheduled job inside an ASP.NET app, you never know if the app or worker process is going to go to sleep or recycle or whatever. I was trying to use Quartz.NET for a while to deal with scheduled jobs, but it wasn't working out for me. My solution has been to just create pages in my site that kick off some process. For example, I have a page that kicks of a currency exchange rate update operation in my DB. The page calls a set of DLLs that: call a URL at Google; scrape the contents with a RegEx to get the exchange rate between the two specified currencies; and updates the exchange rate for the currency in my DB. In order to kick off the event, some other service has to call the page at a regular interval of every hour. (cheap alternative to ridiculously expensive StrikeIron services) Even though the page is built, I haven't yet submitted it to a web-based cron service, but that's my next step. It'd be great if I could setup/run these jobs from some interface in the Winhost control panel instead of having to go through a third-party service to accomplish it. So, YES, I am interested! - Joe P.S. I looooooove Winhost so far. You guys clearly know what you're doing.
Scheduled Tasks - yes, please ! Good call gunsh - I actually signed in just now in order to ask the question "How do I create a scheduled task?" and I'm amazed to find that this feature is not yet available. Please could we have it as soon as possible? If it isn't possible to install it immediately, is it possible to provide a timeframe of when we might expect it to be available? Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback. There is no active project right now on a scheduled task tool so we cannot provide a timeframe.
Other options that are gap fillers. 1. User or buy a cheap linux cpanel hosting account someplace. Set up a quick crob job that hits a certain aspx page (your scheduled task page) here at Winhost using the linux wget command. You should not even need another domain. 2. If your site gets regular traffic build something in to check when the last time a page was run. If the time > 60 minutes (for an hour) then run it while the users session is active. This is a assuming that it would not take long. This is how it is done in Wordpress. These are all just skirting around the real need. But if you really have the need then these will help you out temporarily.
I believe you can also do this by using the Task Manager on most personal computers. If you are running Windows XP and higher, Task Manager should already be available to you. I believe you can setup Task Manager to call on a specific page on the Internet or a batch file that calls on a page on the Internet. But its true, this does seem to be a real backwards way of doing things.
I am a new Winhost user, converting over from DiscountASP, where I was a long time customer. So far I like what Winhost has to offer. I agree, please add some type of scheduling feature. This was one of the nice tools offered by DiscountASP.
The schedule task feature is only available on our Ultimate plan. You may want to check our hosting plan features. http://Winhost.com/windows-hosting-plans.aspx
