Limitations of shared and dedicated hosting over cloud hosting [closed]

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This could be a very basic question but i want to confirm here. Im not sure how to exactly google this hence the question here.

Are these things possible with the traditional web hosting that providers like godaddy and hostgator provide where they give us only a cpanel and ftp access.

1. My application will need to listen for incoming mail replies and process them and add the responses to the DB. So there should be some kinda manual script configuration in the shell.

2. There should be a sc开发者_运维知识库ript which must keep running to check the DB for somekind of patterns and do some processing on the data. Say for example a script that must keep on running and see if there is a specific pattern of data occuring in the DB. Generally the web apps scope starts when a browser clients connects to it and ends when the client terminates. But this script must be running irrespective of the client. One other example is after a specific threshold it selects users and fires mail to them and stuff like that.

I am sure that this needs cloud hosting provided by rakespace or amazon where we have full access to the servers os where we can manually install the web server and do everything ourself. But i just want to confirm it. Also i would like pointers on how to go about implementing the above points.

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You dont necessarily need Cloud hosting, but it sounds like you will need some sort of dedicated machine that you have root on. However if these monitor processes dont need to run in real time you could use a hosting provider that allows you access to cron and just run the monitoring scripts every few minutes.