When using Magento it is important to setup a cron job to run all kinds of maintenance and since version 1.9.1 it is also needed to send some transactional emails.

With a cron job the following jobs are performed:

  • Catalog price rules
  • Newsletters
  • Generating Google sitemaps
  • Customer Alerts/Notifications (product price change, product back in stock)
  • Reindexing (Magento EE 1.13 only)
  • Private sales (Magento EE only)
  • Automatic updating of currency rates
  • Magento EE 1.14.1 and later, Magento CE 1.9.1 and later All Magento e-mails (including order confirmation and transactional)

Source: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/install/installing_install.html

Setting up a cron job in DirectAdmin is easy, just go to “Advanced Features” > “Cronjobs” and fill out the necessary fields.

 Minute */5
 Hour  *
 Day of Month  *
 Month  *
 Day of Week  *
 Command  /bin/sh /home/ *DA-USERNAME* /domains/ *DOMAIN* /public_html/cron.sh

This wil run the command file “cron.sh” every 5 minutes. DirectAdmin will send emails with errors to the email address listed under the field “email” in “” to prevent email for this cron job, add the following to the command: “>/dev/null 2>&1” so your command will read:

/bin/sh /home/DA-USERNAME/domains/DOMAIN/public_html/cron.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

Finally it should look like this:

Cronjob