title: How to get Hangfire started ("always on") in Azure shared hosting?
body: <p>I want to deploy a simple shared-host ASP.NET MVC site to Azure (using the free site option) which uses <a href="http://hangfire.io" rel="noreferrer">Hangfire</a> to run scheduled tasks.</p>
  
  <p>Problem is the site only starts on the first request, and so <a href="http://docs.hangfire.io/en/latest/users-guide/deployment-to-production/making-aspnet-app-always-running.html" rel="noreferrer">Hangfire doesn't start scheduling tasks until then</a>. With IIS or a dedicated VM, you can set the "always on" option to prewarm the site. But this is not possible in shared hosting.</p>
  
  <p>What can I do about this? I thought of paying for the smallest VM, <a href="http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/" rel="noreferrer">called "A0"</a>, and putting a ping script on there to ensure my site is always up. That would work, but seems like overkill.</p>
  
  <p><em>Are there any other good options?</em></p>