Scheduled Posts, Trackbacks/Pingbacks, etc. Not Working

Hi all,

Ever since I changed to WordPress from Blogger in June last year, a lot of the WordPress functions have never worked. This includes:

* Pingbacks and trackbacks – I can receive from others but my blog doesn’t send them out,
* Scheduled posts always miss their schedules – I’ve had to install a plugin so that they work,
* Google XML sitemaps plugin doesn’t update automatically when I publish new posts and I have to do it manually,
* WordPress backup plugin doesn’t save or email my scheduled backup unless I do it manually.
* There’s more but those are the ones I can think of right now.

I have tried downloading and fresh installing the files with no luck. Automatic plugin updates and notifications do work so I’m always able to update WordPress and plugins from within the WordPress dashboard successfully.

I’m not sure whether all the problems listed above may be linked or not but I’m beginning to think that this might now be a web hosting issue? *shrug*

Also, I use MarEdit to markup/create my posts which uses xmlrpc to connect and no trouble with publishing through that.

I don’t understand cron or anything like that. Is there anything I can do to resolve these issues if it isn’t my web hosting or anything to test that theory? I don’t want to shell out on other web hosting then realise that the problems still persist on a new host.

Thanks in advance.
-Lisa.