Hey folks, keeping this thread on track since cron access is a recurring pain point here
I've been through three shared hosts this year looking for real cron — not the wget-to-php garbage that spawns a new HTTP worker every minute. Here's what I found:
- Contabo: "Cron jobs" in their panel are just wget calls to public URLs. No shell.
- Hetzner: Same, but they at least document it. Support confirmed no true cron.
- RackNerd: Claims "full cron" but it's actually their own scheduler wrapping wget with a 5-minute minimum.
The wget hack breaks when your script takes longer than the interval, or when you need environment variables, or when you just want to not have a public-facing endpoint for maintenance tasks. I'm looking for actual /bin/sh execution with MAILTO support.
Anyone found a budget shared host still offering this? I know the 2000s are over, but surely someone remembers how this used to work.
~be kind or be gone~
