Cron is a great tool for linux servers, but it's a very limited in it's capabilities (since it follows the Unix philosophy), so when I started to run up against those limits, I began doing all sorts of bash trickery to accomplish what I needed to happen, but that swiftly started giving me even more problem. At work, I use the Jenkins CI tool as a cron replacement (great tool, allows for distributed runs, queuing tasks, emails on failure, etc), but it seemed rather heavy weight for a homelab.