Setting Up an Automatic Daily Restart With Scheduled Tasks

A scheduled daily restart clears out built-up memory and keeps your server running smoothly, and you can set one up in a couple of minutes on the Scheduled tasks page.

3 min read · Updated Sep 24, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team

A scheduled daily restart clears out built-up memory and keeps your server running smoothly, and you can set one up in a couple of minutes on the Scheduled tasks page.

Game servers slowly use more memory the longer they stay online, and a busy world can start to lag after a day or two of uptime. A short restart at a quiet hour clears that out before anyone notices. Instead of remembering to do it yourself, you let the panel handle it.

What a scheduled task is

A schedule is a named list of steps that the panel runs automatically at a time you pick. Each step is a power action (such as a restart), a console command or a backup, and the steps run one after another. You pick the timing with simple Daily, Weekly or Monthly options, or Custom if you want a cron timetable (a compact way of writing "at this minute, this hour, on these days").

The quick way: a starter

If your server has no scheduled tasks yet, the page offers three starters you can add in one click:

• Restart every night: restarts at 4:00 am every day, only if the server is on.
• Back up every week: takes a backup at 3:00 am every Monday.
• Warn players, then restart: announces the restart in chat at 3:55 am, reminds everyone at 3:59, then restarts at 4:00 am. It asks for the chat command your game uses (most games use say, Palworld uses broadcast).

Open your server (sign in at customer.guavahost.com, open My servers and click Manage), choose Scheduled tasks in the server menu and click the starter you want.

Creating your own daily restart

1. Open Scheduled tasks in the server menu.
2. Click New schedule (or Build your own if the list is empty).
3. Give it a clear Name like Daily Restart.
4. Under How often, choose Daily, then set At what time, for example 5:00 am. Pick an hour when your server is usually empty. The preview underneath shows the next run and which time zone it uses.
5. Leave Skip if the server is offline ticked, so the restart does not switch on a server you had turned off.
6. Under What should it do?, choose Restart the server.
7. Click Create schedule.

That is it. From now on the panel restarts your server every day at the time you chose, whether you are online or not.

Warn your players first (optional but nice)

Many owners warn anyone playing a few minutes before the restart. The Warn players, then restart starter does this for you. To build it yourself, remember that steps run top to bottom and each new step is added at the end, so the warning goes first:

1. Click New schedule and set the time a few minutes before the restart, for example 4:55 am.
2. Under What should it do?, choose Send a command to the console and type a message such as say Server restarting in 5 minutes (for Minecraft and most games). Click Create schedule.
3. Click Add a step, choose Power under What happens, and pick Restart the server.
4. Set Wait before this step to 5 minutes after the step above, then click Add step.

If the game might not understand the chat command, edit the warning step and tick Keep going if this step fails, so the restart still happens.

Choosing a good time

• Pick an hour that matches your players' quiet time, not necessarily your own.
• Once a day is plenty for most servers. Only busy or heavily modded servers benefit from twice-daily restarts.
• Avoid scheduling a restart right on top of a backup so the two do not overlap.

Other handy schedules

The same page can automate more than restarts. You can schedule a nightly backup or a recurring in-game announcement. For Rust specifically, wipes are better handled by Wipes under Rust tools in the server menu, which runs scheduled map and blueprint wipes and can post an announcement to your Discord, rather than by a raw schedule.

If a scheduled restart does not seem to fire, open Scheduled tasks and check the schedule is not Paused, that the time is right, and that it has a restart step. Run now runs it straight away so you can test it.

Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.

• schedules
• scheduled tasks
• restart
• automation
• cron

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