Do I need to use cron for this?

[Dennis_Gull]

Hello, I have programmed an auction site and now I want to send out an email to the winner and the seller with the contact information after the auction is over. I can make a page that generate all auctions thats ended and then set them to quantity = 0 and at the same time send out an email to the buyer and seller. Now heres the question. Should I use a cron job to update the page once in the hour or is it any other solution on how to send automatic emails during certain circumstances? I have no experience with cron but by webhost supports it so I can probably get it to work.

One more thing. Does the website get slowed down if you use the cron job to often?

[Twey]

In this case the cron job is definitely the better way forward. If nobody accesses the site within three hours of the winner winning, for example, the winner won't get his/her email for another three hours.
One more thing. Does the website get slowed down if you use the cron job to often?A little, certainly, but only due to the task. cron itself (or at least most distributions of it) has very little overhead.

[Dennis_Gull]

Thanks for the fast reply, I guess I will try to use CRON then.

Do you know any good tutorials on how to get a CRON job up and running? I cant find any FAQ on how to use it at my webhost.

Edit:

I just got a respond from the host support section, they pointed me to a section where I can place the cron job but still got one little quesiton:

It says "Mail to: <my mail>" should I change <my mail> to the page I want to get updated?

Edit again:
It was the report mail, I got everything up and running now.