kid astronaut

i have a website that requires frequent updates (every monday and thursday to be exact.) i have known for a while that auto-updating was a possibility, but never really known how. making sure to log on twice a week, upload a file, update the database and so on is kind of a pain.

tonight i looked a little bit into CRON, but the information i got was all very vague and outdates. as far as i can tell, it is a function in unix that checks every minute to see if it has any actions it is supposed to perform, and if it does it performs them? so if i set up a crontab to run update.php at midnight every monday and every thursday, this would accomplish what i need, right?

the problem is that i have no idea how to set this up, or even if it is possible with my setup. i've seen a couple tutorials, but they all assume that you're hosting your own website and that you have access to the command line or whatever it's called in unix. i'm hosted by a server like 1,000 miles away so that's not really possible.

does anyone know if there are any general steps to getting this started? or should i just contact my server and ask them about it?

or, is there any other way to automate a php script? i am not married to this cron thing at all.