Using Cron Jobs on Freeola Web Hosting

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

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 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 setup. 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)

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 a separator basically has the same meaning as 'AND'.  i.e '1,7' in the month field tells the Cron job to run in January AND July.