What is cron?

Actually it is called ‘cron daemon’. Cron is an automatic task machine. You will use it on your Unix or Linux operating systems for doing some tasks at specific intervals with out your intervention every time. You set the clock and forget. The cron daemon runs the work for you.

What is cron tab?

‘Cron tab(CRON TABle)’ is a text file that contains a series of cron functions.

What cron will do for you?

>>>If you want to send your email cources to your subscribers at 11.30 night, you will set the cron job on your server.And your cron manager sends the one email every day at 11.30 until all the emails will be finished.

If you want to send them on Sundays, you can schedule it with your cron.

>>>You can schedule it to delete your website members with expired accounts.

>>>You can schedule it to recieve an update on your subscribers from your mailing list manager.

>>>You can check your links on other websites in link exchange programms.

Now if you want to setup a cron job at Hosting Marketers servers, login to your cpanel, go to Cron Jobs, click Standard,

select how you are going to run, once a day, every minute, once a week, what ever, this is the easy part….
We recommend that you dont use anything less then every 30 minutes, imagine that you going to send emails every 1 minute? we will termiante your account before you can say, “WHY!”
So make your selection then use this command:

/usr/bin/php -q /home/myusername/public_html/cron.php

mysername is your cpanel username and cron.php is the file you need to run.

Simple no?

But if for example instead of using the full path you want to use the url, ex. http://domain.com/cron.php

then it is better to use Curl.

Curl is a text based browser that is installed in most hosting environments.

curl http://domain.com/cron.php