You'd have to be really poor

I know there are weak web hosting companies out there that would try to deny you certain inalienable Unix rights such as access to cron, but this is not the right way to deal with it.

It's clever, but it's an abuse. It can't guarantee anything that cron tries to guarantee, depends almost entirely on the chatter of bots, and well, it hurts. Please don't ever write this code. :-/