A cron job is an automated task, that performs a certain action - usually running some script in the web hosting account. The task is scheduled, therefore it will run on a regular basis - hourly, daily, weekly etc. There are many good reasons to employ a cron job for your sites. For example, you may get day-to-day reports how many site visitors have signed up on your website, some temp folder can be emptied automatically weekly or a backup of your content can be created in a standalone folder inside your website hosting account. Making use of cron jobs will help you with the administration of your sites because you are able to have numerous things done automatically and get reports about them, rather than investing precious time and efforts to complete them by hand.

Cron Jobs in Shared Hosting

The Hepsia Control Panel, which is featured with all the Linux shared hosting packages, will help you to create cron jobs in a few easy steps even when you haven't ever employed such a option before. After you log in and go to the Cron Jobs area where you can set background tasks, you just need to paste the system access path to Perl, Python or PHP based on the script that you'll run, type the path in your account for the actual script file and then select how often your cron job has to be carried out. For the aforementioned, you'll be able to use the basic mode and choose the days, hours, minutes, etc. through straightforward drop-down options, or if you are more experienced, you can use the advanced mode and specify the time interval with numbers and asterisks i.e. the usual method that you may have employed with different Control Panels.