Using Cron Jobs on Freeola Web Hosting

The Freeola Web Hosting service offers the ability for customers to set up cron jobs.

A CRON job allows you automatically run a PHP script on your website at a specified time or on a recurring schedule.

If you have a Freeola Web Hosting service you can access Cron Jobs from the My Websites section of your MyFreeola account by selecting Options & FTP Settings next to the website you would like to view/add these on.

On the new page simply scroll down to the section labelled Cron Jobs, then click Manage Cron Jobs.

Cron jobs are time-based tasks that are carried out automatically by our web hosting servers.

The system is a scheduler which runs tasks at given times. This can be anything from scripts that need to be run every hour to monthly checks on whether there are updates for a piece of software.

Freeola Web Hosting allows customers to specify a schedule to run scripts from within their web space.

The Freeola Web Hosting Cron settings page has 5 inputs to allow a scheduled task to be set-up. The fields are defined as:

1. Minutes (0 - 59)

2. Hour (0 - 23)

3. Day of month (1 - 31)

4. Month (1 - 12)

5. Weekday (0 - 6) (0 to 6 are Sunday to Saturday)

A drop-down list of the most common settings for each field can be found next to the field in question.

Other common syntax used in Cron jobs are:

1. * (asterisk) - Meaning 'all' or every possible setting.  i.e a '*' in the minute field will tell the Cron job to run every minute.

2. - (hyphen) - Used for setting a range.  i.e  '9-17' in the hour field will tell the Cron job to run at 9 A.M and 5 P.M plus every hour in between.

3. , (comma) - When used as a separator, has the same meaning as 'AND'.  i.e '1,7' in the month field tells the Cron job to run in January AND July.

Once you have set your variables, click Add Cron Job to save and set your script to run automatically.

You can now add further cron jobs using the same fields, or use Back to Overview to return to your website settings.