Cron – Ken Depelchin

I’m currently using one.com for my web hosting. I use it for personal testing and geeking around in nerdville. Lately the services of one.com where not enough anymore. I always could use and test what I wanted. It’s cheap and you have 24/7 support via chat.

I was building a website for a friend who owns a restaurant and he needed a guestbook page. Stubborn as I am, I didn’t want to create a guestbook when there are all these restaurant reviews websites around (with a lot of great content!). My first decision was to crawl some of these services and to show these reviews in our very own design. This worked seemingly fine but the page load was a huge turn-off. So; cronjobs!

The live chat support with one.com was something like this (and is mostly the same):

Me: Hey!
She: Hey, how can I help you?
Me: Do you support cron jobs?
She: No.
She: Is there anything else I can help you with?

With no SSH access this would be a serious hitch. Luckily there are a lot of paid (and free) services where you can set up your cron jobs. mywebcron is the one(pun) i’m using. Totally free and right to the point.

The script called does all the crawling and saves everything to my database. The pageload is now a complete turn-on. ah yezz.
It’s not the most clever solution, but it was all set up in about 10 minutes all-included. The cron runs every 15 minutes, just because I can. It’s also great to see when your website is offline.

There is another free service called Setcronjob which offers paid plans as well. You get 50 points which means you can run 50 cronjobs daily. A big limition when you compare the previous one, but you’ll get email notifications. If you don’t run time expensive scripts (like mine) this would be a great service because of the cron timeout settings per plan.