Hello, I am writing an online auction site using php and I am setting up a cron job to select the ending auctions by using timestamps. The problem I am running into is that my hosting service will only let me run cron jobs every 15 minutes. My question would be is there any programming tricks that I can using to make my auctions work without having a cron job run every minute. Thanks for any suggestions.
You could check for auctions to end on every page load, but you’ll either be running an update far more often than you need to, or it won’t run enough as the auctions would only update when a person or bot loads the site.
As for the restriction on cron jobs - that’s absurd. I’d suggest using a web host that doesn’t limit you in that way.
Thanks. Sorry for the belated reply. Yes, I am using host gator but I am on their hatchling plan. This limits me to a cron job every 15 minutes. It seems that I was have to upgrade my account to VPS hosting. I will then be able to run a cron job every minutes which should do it. But I do like your suggestion about using a bot or on page loads.