Quick Answer
An online cron job runs on a hosted scheduler instead of your own server. You give it a cron expression and a URL to hit. Requex.me does this free — timezone support, automatic retries, expected status code assertions, and a webhook notification when a job fails. No SSH, no crontab -e, no dedicated VM.
Online Cron Job — Free Hosted Scheduler
Run cron jobs in the cloud without owning a server. Paste a cron expression, point it at a URL, pick a timezone. Requex handles execution, retries, and alerts.
Why hosted cron beats crontab
Running cron on your own server is fine until you start asking the boring questions. What happens when the VM reboots mid-run? How do you get alerted when the job fails silently for three weeks? Where do you see logs? How do you pause a job without SSHing in?
Hosted cron answers those by default. The scheduler runs on someone else's infra. Failures alert you. Logs are queryable in a UI. Pausing is a toggle. The only thing your code needs to do is respond to the HTTP request.
Trade-off: your scheduler now lives outside your VPC. For most internal jobs (cache warmers, daily exports, health checks, webhook re-sends) that is fine. For secret-handling jobs you can not move outside your network, run your own.
What you can configure
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Cron expression | Standard 5-field cron, e.g. 0 3 * * * for 3 AM daily |
| Timezone | IANA names — UTC, America/New_York, Asia/Kolkata |
| HTTP method | GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE |
| URL | Any public HTTPS endpoint — your API, a webhook, a teammate's server |
| Headers + body | Custom headers (auth tokens, content-type) and JSON / text body |
| Expected status / body | Job fails if the response code or body content does not match — catches silent failures |
| Retries + backoff | Configurable retry count and delay between attempts |
| Auto-pause threshold | Pause the job after N consecutive failures — stops alert spam |
| Failure webhook | POST to a webhook when a job fails — wire into Slack, PagerDuty, your own alerting |
Common use cases
If it can be expressed as "hit this URL on this schedule," this fits:
- •Keep-alive pings — wake a Heroku / Render / Fly app every 5 minutes so the cold start does not bite users at 9 AM.
- •Daily exports / backups — trigger a backup endpoint at 3 AM in your timezone, with retries if it fails.
- •Cache warming — hit a list of expensive routes every morning so the first user does not pay the cold-cache penalty.
- •Uptime / health monitors — assert expected status code and body, alert on miss. A poor man's Pingdom that costs nothing.
- •Scheduled webhooks — fire a webhook into Zapier / n8n / your own service on a schedule. Useful for integrations that lack native scheduling.
- •API polling — poll a third-party API that does not send webhooks, transform the response, forward to your system.
Example: a daily 3 AM backup that retries
Configuration:
Cron: 0 3 * * *
Timezone: America/Los_Angeles
Method: POST
URL: https://api.example.com/internal/backup
Headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer ${BACKUP_TOKEN}" }
Expected: status 200, body contains "ok"
Retries: 3 with 30s backoff
Auto-pause: after 5 consecutive failures
Notify: https://hooks.slack.com/services/...If the backup endpoint returns anything other than 200 with "ok", Requex retries three times, then posts to your Slack webhook. After five straight failed days, the job auto-pauses so you stop getting paged.
Cron expression reference
| Schedule | Expression |
|---|---|
| Every minute | * * * * * |
| Every 5 minutes | */5 * * * * |
| Every hour at :30 | 30 * * * * |
| 3 AM daily | 0 3 * * * |
| Weekdays 9 AM | 0 9 * * 1-5 |
| Sundays at noon | 0 12 * * 0 |
| First of month | 0 0 1 * * |
Need help writing one? Use the cron expression builder.
Common questions
Is the online cron job service really free?
Yes, for normal development use. You can create cron jobs, schedule them, and view logs without paying. Heavy production usage (thousands of executions per minute) may eventually move to a paid tier, but most teams never hit that ceiling.
What is the minimum schedule interval?
Every minute. Cron expressions support standard 5-field syntax — anything shorter than 1 minute is not part of the cron spec.
Can I test my cron job without waiting for the schedule?
Yes — every cron job has a "Run now" button that executes the configured HTTP request immediately and shows the response. Useful for verifying auth headers and payload format before going live.
How are failures handled?
A job "fails" when the response status differs from your expected code, the response body misses your assertion string, or the request times out. Failures trigger retries (up to your configured count), and after the retry budget is exhausted Requex POSTs to your notification webhook URL. Long failure streaks auto-pause the job.
Does the scheduler handle DST correctly?
Yes. Specify an IANA timezone like Europe/London and Requex evaluates the cron expression in that zone — a job at "9 AM London time" stays at 9 AM London time when clocks change.
How is this different from EasyCron, cron-job.org, or Cronitor?
EasyCron and cron-job.org are scheduler-only. Cronitor focuses on monitoring existing crons. Requex bundles scheduling, response assertions, retries, failure webhooks, and webhook capture in one tool — you can schedule a job AND inspect what hits the target endpoint from the same UI.
Related
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