Not planned Allow use of external cron service for CRON job

TPerry

Well-known member
After helping out another admin, it was discovered that his hosting provider does not allow any CRON jobs to be created at a less than 5 minute interval. Apparently (from some research) other major hosting companies do the same.
This can cause an issue if you have a site that is not busy (a new site) as you get warnings in the ACP about certain CRON jobs not being ran since you can only use the activity choice, with no/minimal activity it causes issues.
There are external CRON services that can be used, and at least one competitor script, which also uses a similar process to run CRON jobs, has the ability to link with an external provider to run CRON jobs.
Some examples of these services are:
cronjob.org (free)
EasyCron (paid)
FastCron (paid)

For those admins that don't have a busy enough site to trigger the CRON processes, and who cannot set a cron job of any less than 5 minutes between runs, this could be a viable option.
 
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Thing is, most of these just perform HTTP requests to a given URL.

They work with the activity based trigger.

If you send a HTTP request via one of these services once per minute, it will count as activity and trigger the cron jobs to run…
 
I think my point was more that it needs to be shown as an option.
IPS makes it REALLY easy to understand.
It's not like it's a "major" thing to have to code into the system... just something that makes it easier for an admin to understand.
I

Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 8.23.50 AM.png
 
Using Easy Cron just needs activity trigger to be left as it is and when logged into Easy Cron just add the Url like so:

Code:
https://websiteurl.com/job.php

You can test it to make sure it works and then you're done. I run this on my three sites, and it works great. I use the $24 a year tier and that gives me 8,000 executions per day, in reality I only use 4,320 so plenty of headroom. For example, executing every minute is 1440 EPD. Saves a lot of head scratching lol. Hope that helps.
 
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