Service or Application on Web Server Running ASP.net

Is there a term or practice of running an application on a web server? I would like to run a program either console application to send commands to my ASP.net application. Some commands would drop tables, delete expired records, and update table data.

Should I use a web service to perform these tasks or is there another method for employing these executions? Is it possible to write something like this and have it running as a background service?

Also, I would like it to run as a process with at any an option to disable the process. Consider the term "web application sub-worker."

Any help or comment about this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I guess you could do this as a web service - send a message to a web service method, then web service would talk to the db and do what you need. You could also have a Windows Service where you could communicate through TCP (or text files for that matter). Web service would probably be faster to write.

A web service runs through IIS, so somebody could always shut down IIS - don't know if you're going to find a way to make sure it can't get shut down. Heck, you can always unplug the machine :) A windows service can be stopped as well. IIS is actually a windows service itself.

With either option, as long as your service (or IIS) is set to start up automatically, it will be on after you reboot and before you log in to Windows.

HTH,
Mike

Thank you for your response, Mike. I have a few more questions and comments.

I thought web services are written to run only when the actual service is requested, or called upon. Does it seem feasible to have the web service running as a concurrent process, like a background process? In my situation, I have a site running on a shared server.

The program that I am looking to write would run on the server and perform necessary automated tasks such as: checking for expired users, deleting their accounts, send email notifications on a daily or weekly basis or 1 day before their account would expire.
All of this without me actually running a script on a daily or weekly basis.

However, if necessary, I want to have the control killing the process by means of an admin page or command line argument.

Hope I understand you right. Yes, a web service does something when called upon, request/response type thing. But it runs through IIS, which is a service that's probably always running. Now, I've seen that you can put timers etc in a web service, but I've never tried that - I've just done the request/response thing. You might want to try that and see if it would work for you.

I'm not sure about killing the process - not sure if you can do that through a web service method or if you'd have to have IIS shut it down. You probably could, through a web service, send a command and set a variable or something that you could then check in your methods to disable anything from happening.

That's all conjecture, though, not even sure if it helps.