Creating a websocket system without pusher or nodejs?

Hi guys and girls.

Loving the new event broadcasting in laravel and have used it in a few apps, its just awesome!

However im working on an app now that may become distributable opensource.

Now the key to this is making it easy to install, works pretty much everywhere etc.

The problem with this is pusher is a paid service (and requires signup even if it was free). And the socket.io/redis option requires more than your average shared hosting account will have setup by default (node js, redis, installing, proccess watching, etc).

Im keen to keep it accessible to people on shared hosting which gives me a dilema.

how in the hell am i going to create a websocket server, keep it running etc without requiring the end user to "set something up".

Initial thoughts are around the rachet php server but cant be sure.

The "app" will have a cronjob they need to setup so maybe have an artisan command which runs on a schedule and uses the symfony Proccess class to test if the rachet server is running and if not restart it?

anybody done anything like this before without using tools that require a: more setup, b: more complexity than your average end user?