How do reminder scripts work? Planning to build an "Appointment Reminder" script which can send automated emails. I know we can use cron jobs to trigger the script execution on a daily basis. But here is what I need to know. If I schedule a cron job every midnight it would only check at that particular time. What if there is an appointment at 5pm? (and I want the reminders to be sent atleast 1 hour before the appointment time)
Cron jobs can run every minute if you need them to. Just schedule it to run often enough to meet the granularity requirements for your notifications.
do have access with the host? if you do, instead of cron run it in the processes of linux as long as your server runs that code runs, execution load will be minimal for the server.
I am using Hostgator. I could see the option for running cron job from my cpanel (also have the option for running it every single minute).