I can’t remember where exactly I heard about this web host, but InsaneGB.com sounded like a great deal. You can read their website for more details, but in a nutshell they got PHP 5, MySQL 4, and everything (Databases, Add-on domains, etc) is unlimited except disk space and bandwidth. They give you 5GB for disk space and 20GB on bandwidth per month. Which is great for a free host, if you ask me; heck, they even offer cron jobs.

Testing Their Setup

So I decided to give them a shot. I put up my personal blog on their server. In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t such a great idea, but I did it anyway. At first everything was great. Stuff was fast and everything was popping up instantly. There were some things that most would consider acceptable for a free host.

• I couldn’t run any PHP ini_set commands

  So there’s no increasing running time for scripts. I guess I would live without that.

• You can’t open/download any files from outside servers

  This I came across when trying to use some of my Wordpress plugins that automatically install plugins and automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation. Oh, well.

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What To Do When You Can’t Cron

One pet peeve that I have with 1and1 hosting was their lack of Cron Jobs. Cron Jobs are basically the Unix method of scheduling stuff, much like the Windows Task Scheduler. If you’re on a Unix/Linux host, then they use cron jobs to schedule their internal activity. But not every host is kind enough to give you the same power to do so. Now that I’m on DreamHost, I don’t have this problem anymore, but a lot of shared hosts still lock up the cron jobs. And since hosts like 1and1 aren’t too reliable with their backups, doing your own backups becomes, more of less, essential. There are, of course, alternatives if your host doesn’t provide you with cron jobs, such as phpJobScheduler (used this a lot back in the day) and pseudo-cron.

How The Other Guys Work

The way these work is that, they keep track of tasks and times every time the cron job is called, but you need to include them in one of your highly accessed pages (e.g. Home page). With phpJobScheduler, you can include the file in your PHP code, or you can include it using the img tag. Using the second (2nd) method spits back a transparent GIF of 1 pixel, so nothing will be displayed on your page and you could even use it within plain HTML pages if you needed to. When this is triggered, it checks the database for time of each task, compares that to the current time, them if x > y it runs the task. Simple really. Since they need to be triggered via a user visit, it’s never going to be pin point accurate; this is why you need to include it on a page getting high traffic. Some of the scripts even have an option to build in to help with this. It’s a sort of buffer time. This says that even if the specific start time of the task hasn’t arrived yet, run it anyway if it’s within the buffer amount. You would increase or decrease the buffer based on your anticipated traffic.

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