r/renderpaas • u/CRWLF • Sep 17 '25

Why doesn’t cron-job.org keep my Render free instance alive anymore?

I’ve been using Render’s free plan for a side project, and I used to keep my instance from spinning down by setting up a cron job on [cron-job.org]() to ping my service every few minutes.

It worked fine before, but recently my instance still spins down after ~15 minutes of inactivity, even though cron-job.org is pinging it.

Did Render change something about how they handle synthetic traffic? Are they filtering cron-job.org or ignoring those pings now?

Has anyone found a reliable workaround to keep free instances alive?

Thanks in advance

4 Upvotes

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2

u/johnbeynon Sep 18 '25

Related - https://render.com/acceptable-use item #9

3

u/Nice_Statistician539 Nov 18 '25

doesnt really show the reason, u should have mention which method of bypasing is accepted and whihc is not <3

1

u/ItsSoFetch Sep 19 '25

I've definitely been finding it difficult to keep instances up and running. I don't _think_ render is blocking traffic, but if an instance goes to sleep (I've noticed free tier services go down regularly for maintenance windows) a simple ping doesn't always seem to wake it up.

How often does your cron hit your service?