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So I just figured out the business model of services like easycron.com. The name threw me for a loop, in that, (1) their interface isn't significantly easier than just doing the old crontab -e thing for yourself; (2) and to the extent it is, you can just use a free online crontab generator and cut-n-paste; and (3) they charge money for something that is basically already free.
I had hypothesized that it serves people who want cron but aren't allowed to have it by their, say, shared web hosting hosts. Maybe that's a thing? My shared web hosting hosts have cpanel, and for as long as I've been with them (which isn't too terribly long, just a few years) they've had the cpanel interface to cron. Honestly, I would think most people who know how to spell cron would have access to it. (I say this as someone who has, an entirely embarassingly number of times, typed man chron at a prompt.)
But I've figured it out. The problem in my perspective is that I hadn't previously actually tried to use cron for anything actually important on a shared device, like a business purpose.
Vanilla-flavored cron -- there are allegely more enlightened varieties, but not on Debian -- interprets all times expressed in crontabs in whatever the timezone of the server is. Period.
There's a bunch of hacks you can do if you're running the server personally, but if you don't have root or otherwise aren't in a position to configure the whole machine, you're mostly out of luck, unless you want to run an every-minute cronjob which just fires off a smarter program that does your actual cronjobs.
Or you can use easycron.com, which lets you set the timezone of your jobs.
Seriously, apparently their business model is to some substantial extent leveraging the fact that Javier Fernndez-Sanguino Pea refuses to implement timezone sensitivity in Debian's cron. And whomever else is refusing to implement tz sensitivity into their distro's crons.
Now I'm looking into at.
I had hypothesized that it serves people who want cron but aren't allowed to have it by their, say, shared web hosting hosts. Maybe that's a thing? My shared web hosting hosts have cpanel, and for as long as I've been with them (which isn't too terribly long, just a few years) they've had the cpanel interface to cron. Honestly, I would think most people who know how to spell cron would have access to it. (I say this as someone who has, an entirely embarassingly number of times, typed man chron at a prompt.)
But I've figured it out. The problem in my perspective is that I hadn't previously actually tried to use cron for anything actually important on a shared device, like a business purpose.
Vanilla-flavored cron -- there are allegely more enlightened varieties, but not on Debian -- interprets all times expressed in crontabs in whatever the timezone of the server is. Period.
There's a bunch of hacks you can do if you're running the server personally, but if you don't have root or otherwise aren't in a position to configure the whole machine, you're mostly out of luck, unless you want to run an every-minute cronjob which just fires off a smarter program that does your actual cronjobs.
Or you can use easycron.com, which lets you set the timezone of your jobs.
Seriously, apparently their business model is to some substantial extent leveraging the fact that Javier Fernndez-Sanguino Pea refuses to implement timezone sensitivity in Debian's cron. And whomever else is refusing to implement tz sensitivity into their distro's crons.
Now I'm looking into at.