We are setting up the cron job in Pro and are being told that it needs to be set to run hourly. This is different from the old 3.x aMember that we are used to. A couple of questions: Currently when we have a new client, no matter what time of the day they purchase their subscription, they are billed at the time of sale and then every 30 days there after. Our cron is set to run daily at 5am and all of our daily recurring billings happen at that time. With the cron running every hour, will this change the time that a recurring client is set to be billed? What are the pro's (purpose) to setting the cron to every hour? What are the con's of setting it to run daily at a specific time? Also, with the Pro version we want to not use an email service (aWeber for example) and use the feature Pending Invoice Notification for an automated sales campaign. Does anyone in the community see a problem with this? Much thanks to anyone who can help!
The hourly cron is to allow for various widgets to process. I have not looked to see when expiry processing is done Caeser will probably chime in later. As to mail, you are far better off going to someone like SendGrid to process your mail, especially if you are on shared hosting other users of the machine can get your ip address in the SPAM list then you are well and truely stuffed, also most host do not allow more than 35-100 message PER HOUR.
aMember require hourly cron because it is necessary to process some background task hourly. You can set cron daily but I do not recommend to do it. The impact is task that should be processed hourly will be processed only daily. For example pending invoice notification that you set up to send several hours later after purchase attempt or process mail queue. In case you set up hourly cron and you use payment system which trigger rebills from aMmeber side then aMember process it midnight. You can do not use aWeber at all. It is option integration. I do not see any issue with it. Actually aWeber is not involved in Pending Invoice Notification process even if you enable this plugin.