Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hello all,

The Christmas and new year are coming :) I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

As a gift to you in this Christmas, I'll give you a sweet offer: Gold account is now only $15 / year, and Diamond account is now only $20 / year. 

Upgrade your account now!

How To Group Your Cron Jobs

With SetCronJob, you can create an unlimited number of cron jobs. So, manage them is a bit difficulty, although you can name a cron jobs.

When upgrading SetCronJob to version 4.0, I added Separator, a "blank" cron job with a name and no URL. You can use the separator to group your cron jobs:

- Create a separator with group name, e.g "Here are example.com cron jobs".

- Create all the cron jobs you need.

- Repeat these steps for other groups :)

Here is an example on how I group my cron jobs:

How To Renew Your Cron Jobs For FREE

One of differences between previous version and version 4.0 is the expiry date. After that day, your cron jobs will expire and be deleted from your account.

So, how to renew your cron jobs? There are two ways, and all of them are FREE:

1. Edit and save your cron jobs.

When you save your cron jobs, the expiry date will be recalculated based on your account's limit.

For example, your account is Bronze, and your cron job is going to expire after 1 week.
After being edited and saved, your cron job will expire after 1 year (cron jobs every 5 minutes or more) or 3 months (cron jobs every minute or more).

2. Complete a survey.

You can complete a survey (which is totally FREE) and renew all of your cron jobs for 1 months. 

Hope this helps :)

Your accounts have been moved!

Hello all,

The version 4.0 has been uploaded. Your account has been moved. You can now log in and check your account.

If you found something wrong, contact me as soon as possible.
Thank you for your interest in SetCronJob's service :)

Welcome to SetCronJob version 4.0!

SetCronJob version 4.0

I've decided to upgrade SetCronJob to version 4.0 with some changes. My customers had been invited to check the new version, and they were all happy with that version. Here are some changes:

- The pricing system has been changed.

Most of my users found the old version's prices are too complicated to understand, and they are a bit confused about my offers. So, a big change has been made.

I call those things are 'unlimited' packages, since you can create unlimited cron jobs, even with a free account.

- The Control Panel has been redesigned.

- You can now add separator to "group" your cron jobs.

- The Frequently Asked Questions has been created.

When will it be public?

Currently I'm doing some final steps. The new version is ready to online, and it will be public after next some days.

What will you do with current account?

I'll move all of the account to new version without any change on username, password, email, cron jobs settings and features, etc.

I'll convert the balance value to a premium account, according to this:

- Balance from $30: Diamond account in balance/30 years.

- Balance from $20: Gold account in balance/20 years.

- Balance from $10: Silver account in balance/10 years.

- Balance from $2.5: Bronze account in balance/5 years (at least 1 year).

- Balance from $1: Bronze account in 6 months.

- Balance from $0.5: Bronze account in 3 months.

- Balance from $0.05: Bronze account in 1 month.

- The rest: FREE account (never expire).

All of your cron jobs will be kept unchanged (include time setting, features, name, etc), and will expire after one year.

Users with balance<=0 will get a free account, too, but their cron jobs will be disabled. They must enable them manually.

I did pay for SetCronJob v3.0. Am I required to make payment again?

NO. You are not required to make any payment. The only changes are your cron jobs will expire after 1 years (plus 3 months - added when your account expire) instead of years :)

I would like to continue to use the current version. What to do?

I'm sorry, but I will not keep SetCronJob version 3.0.

If you have any question, let me know :)

Get 10,000 FREE Cron Jobs every day!

From now on, you can complete a FREE survey and get 10,000 FREE Cron Jobs every day!
Simply log in with your account, click on Get FREE credits, then Start a survey!

It will take you less than one minute to complete ONE survey, and your account will get credited immediately!

Check it out :)

--

If you don't see anything:

• You already completed a survey today. Please come back tomorrow.
• There's no survey in your country now.
• You disabled JavaScript, or you blocked CPALead.com

Please note that these surveys do not come from SetCronJob, and there's no relation to SetCronJob, too.

How much do your crons cost?

I've added Estimated cost and how long your cron will be kept executing at the Control Panel.

For example, I have three cron jobs daily, one cron job every 6 hours, one cron job every 30 minutes, and here's the estimation:

You have 5 cron jobs. Estimated cost: $0.20075 / year. Your cron will be executed in 4454 years 2 months 13 days 18 hours.

So, if I make a payment of $1, it's enough to launch my cron for 5 years :D

SetCronJob now accepts PayPal

You can now make payment directly through PayPal and get your account credited just in one minute!

To buy credits, log in with your account, then click Buy Now button at the bottom of Control Panel.

Enter the amount you would like to deposit at Quantity field, then click Update Totals.
The minimum amount that you can pay is only $1 :) 

After completing the payment, you will be redirected to SetCronJob, and your account will be credited immediately.

Check it out :)

--
You can also make payment through 2CheckOut as well.

SetCronJob is now cheaper!

I've change the Cost of a cron job execution:

COST = ceiling(Total execution time in second / 2 )*$0.00001 +ceiling(Output length in KB / 4)*$0.00001

and Max output length (HTTP response) from 10 KBs to 32 KBs.

So, if your cron jobs takes 15 seconds to complete, and its output length is 17 KBs, it will cost ceiling(15/2)+ceiling(17/4) = $0.00013 / a cron.

Now SetCronJob is two times cheaper than before :)

CronJobs are warranted to execute on time

The uptime button of SetCronJob indicates that my site is up 100% in 33 days.

But, sooner or later there will be a downtime, and I can't control that :(

In a downtime, you can't access my site, and your Cron Jobs will not be executed. And that's a really big problem. As mentioned before, your cron jobs will be executed later. But it becomes a bad idea when SetCronJob offers cron jobs every minute.

So, I've created a system that warrant your cron jobs to execute on time, even when the main server is down.

How it works?

I just buy a web hosting (called secondary server), and it automatically gets a copy of main server's database every 30 minutes. When the main server is down, it will used that database to execute your cron jobs.

When executing your cron jobs, the secondary server will do everything exactly like main server, except Logging and Notification: the output will not be stored into main server's database, and you will not get notification message.

All of your cron jobs will executed on time and you will not be charged (account balance keeps unchanged) when main server is down.

In other words, the secondary server will not update the database of main server.

Secondary server's IP is 188.40.68.118, and it's user agent is same with main server: SetCronJob/1.0 (+http://www.setcronjob.com/).

---
Thanks Sebastien WILLEMIJNS for the idea :)

PHP Cron Jobs - HowTo, Tips and Trick

How to set up PHP cron jobs?

To set up PHP cron jobs, there's two way to do:
- Using the /usr/bin/php /path/to/file.php command in your cron tab.
If you have access to CronJobs, you can simply enter that command into the "Command to execute" field.

But this way is not recommended, as your script may not run expected. It's difficult to parse some variable to the script, too.

- Set cron job to call its URL.
This is more convenient, and you can test whether your script executes as expected or not just by entering its URL into browser.
You can use the wget or lynx command to call that URL, and lynx is recommended, as it's a browser.

To set up PHP cron jobs with lynx, you can enter lynx http://www.example.com/cron.php with http://www.example.com/cron.php is PHP script's URL. You can also add some GET variable into the URL using ?var1=value[&var2=value2&....].
Or, you can try some free cron jobs services to set up your PHP cron jobs :) Most of them work perfectly, and have their own simple WebCron interface.

PHP Cron Jobs - Tips and Trick.
- To make sure your cron jobs run until finishing its jobs, you can try tips at Set cron jobs with PHP scripts.
- To prevent your cron script from running when you create / save / enable your cron at SetCronJob, read this tips.
- If you wanna set cron job every minute to do some small jobs, you can buy a cron every minute at price of $10 / year from SetCronJob.
- You may wanna build your own web cron service, and phpJobsScheduler is a good choice for you :)

Cron job every minute!

Last updated on Jan 25, 2010.

With SetCronJob, you can create an unlimited number of cron jobs every minute for just $10 / year (Silver account).

From now on, you can create:

- Cron jobs every x minutes (x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30)
- Cron jobs every x hours (x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12)
- Cron jobs every x days (x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10)
- Cron jobs weekly
- Cron jobs monthly
- Cron jobs yearly (who need?)
- Any cron that you need :)

Sign in and get money :)

When you register an account, you will get $0.01, or 1,000 free cron job executions.

Now, when you log in, you will get 10 cron job execution / a day :)

Check it out :)

Time pattern

I've just added Time pattern and Failure time at Basic HTML Control Panel.

The time pattern will look exactly like Crontab syntax, for example, cron job every 5 minutes has time pattern */5 * * * *.

Click on Basic HTML link at bottom of SetCronJob's Control Panel to see it :)

Over 4 millions cron jobs have been executed :)

You can see the stats at SetCronJob's homepage:

Number of users: 1689
Number of cron jobs: 2601
Processed jobs: 4,034,205

Every day, SetCronJob processes about 120,000 cron jobs :)

Thank you for using SetCronJob :)

SetCronJob is a FREE cron job?

Last updated on Thu, 21 Jan 2010

Is SetCronJob a free service? Yes, obviously :D

SetCronJob offers FREE Account which is FREE to sign up. With FREE Account, you can create unlimited cron jobs every 5 minutes. Free account will never expire.

Check FREE Account vs Premium Account at SetCronJob.

Everything goes stable

After a big downtime, then delay 15 seconds on outgoing connection, then down again, now every thing goes stable.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this downtime.

Delay 15 seconds on connecting...

Sometime you may see the connection time is more than 15 seconds although the max connection time is only 3 seconds.

I had asked my hosting provider, and was told that it's scheduled network maintenance (??).
It often lasts about 1 or 2 hours.

Here's the message from HP:
It's possible that the delay you experienced was due to the planned network maintenance that took place...

As SetCronJob calculates price by connection time and output length, if the connection time is more than 15 seconds, it will be decreased by 15. For example, you see the connection time is 15.2 seconds and output length is 0.9 KB, the cost will be ceiling(15.2 - 15) + ceiling(0.9) = 2 (*$0.00001).

This will be considered a downtime, and SetCronJob's daemon will not work when this problem occured although you can access SetCronJob normally. All missing jobs will be executed later.

Missing jobs will be executed.

As I cannot control the server downtime caused by my hosting provider, from now on, all missing jobs after a downtime will be executed later.

There are 3 solutions:

- Execute all missing jobs when my server is up.
This is a big bang :D and of course I don't use it :)

- Execute all missing jobs along with new jobs.
E.g, my server is down at 22:01, and it's up again at 23:01, so at 23:05, it will execute all cron jobs that should be executed at 22:05 (missing jobs) and 23:05 (new jobs).

But this may be a bit terrible if your heavy script (e.g backing up) run at the same time: if you set cron job every 30 minutes, at 23:30, it will run twice a minute :(

- Execute all cron jobs 3 times faster than normal.
With the example above, at 23:05, it will execute all cron jobs that should execute at 22:05, 22:10, 22:15.
At 23:05, it will execute all cron jobs that should execute at 22:20, 22:25, 22:30.
....

This will affect all normal cron jobs, but it the best way that I can do :)

After the downtime length / 2, every thing will go normally.

4.5 hours of downtime >"<

SetCronJob was down from 22:00 GMT Sep 24, 2009 to 2:30 GMT Sep 25, 2009.

This is unexpected network maintenance of my hosting provider.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Here's the message from my HP:

We need to perform some emergency network as soon as possible. This has been scheduled for tonight, which we appreciate is very short notice. We need to reboot a router to install new software, and this reboot will take up to 45 minutes. We will do everything we can to speed up the process as much as we can and reduce the maintenance time.
Date: 24/09/2009
Window: 23:00 for 2 hours
Duration: < 45 minutes.

The maintenance is to perform an emergency upgrade of Cisco software. We are using a Cisco VSS-1440 as part of our network core, and we have been experiencing some reduced performance with it today. There is no cause within our network configuration and set up of this, and it started to have a detrimental effect on some clients today. We escalated this to the Cisco TAC team, who have diagnosed a fault with the software on the router in the form of a memory leak. Cisco has supplied us with a new version of the software for the router which will fix the memory leak and slow performance.

The nature of this problem is that it will escalate as time goes on, which is why we want to apply the fix as soon as core business hours finish today. Please accept our apologies for the short notice, we hope our clients appreciate this problem was out of our control caused by Cisco software, and we are working as best we can to resolve it quickly.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any queries or questions regarding this maintenance window.

Some small changes

- Users can now login with email as username. Simply enter your email into username field, your password then press Enter.

- Cron jobs will be disabled after 24 consecutive failures. (Old value is 3 times.)

- In Basic HTML Control Panel, you must confirm the deletion.

Server Uptime, Server Load and Server Time

I've added a server uptime button (from host-tracker),  server load and  server time stats at the homepage.

This is useful for me to monitor the site uptime and server load.

You may see every 5 minutes, the server load goes high, about 0.10, then downs to zero after 1 - 2 minutes. That's time my cron daemon is launched.

Prevent your script from running when create/enable cron jobs

UPDATED on Jan 24, 2010: Now SetCronJob will execute your script and check for problem only when create / enable failed cron jobs.

Every time you create / enable your cron job, your script will be executed. If you don't want this, follow this tip:

1. Move your script to other (temporary) location.

2. Create an empty file with script's name in its directory, e.g cron.php.

3. Create/Enable your cron job.

4. Delete empty file, and move your script to its original location.

This can be applied with all scripts.

If your script is written in PHP, add this

<?php
exit;
?>

at beginning of your PHP script.

Other server-side programming languages may have its exit function. Check its documentation.

SetCronJob version 3.0

Hi all,

I'm happy to introduce SetCronJob version 3.0 now :)

1. No migration.

Don't worry, there's no change in users table. No need to register new account :)

2. Logging, Notification, TimeOut.

You can now set (MAX) execution (response) time. E.g, if your script executes completely in 24 seconds, set TimeOut to at least 24 or 27 seconds.

Maximum execution time is 60 seconds.

Logging feature must be enabled to enable TimeOut and Notification.

3. Price and cost: every thing should be fair.

Cost of a cron job once being executed is calculated using this equation:

COST = CEIL(Total execution time in second)*$0.00001 + CEIL(Output length in KB)*$0.00001 + Number of sent messages*$0.00010

Check it at Cron Hosting.

in version 2.0, a cron job without logging output may take up to 3 seconds to complete (it's the max connection timeout), and its cost is only $0.00001. A cron job with logging output may take only 0.1 seconds to connect, and 0.2 second to get response less than 0.1 KB, and its cost is $0.00010, which is 10 times bigger than the first one :)

In version 3.0, first cron will cost $0.00003, and the seconds one is only $0.00002, which is only 2/3 of the first cron, and 1/5 of version 2.0.

You can see that the smallest cost of a cron job is $0.00001 - without logging, and $0.00002 - with logging output, instead of $0.00001 and $0.00010 in old version.

And, if your cron job without logging output, and connection time (include request time) is less than 1 second, there's no change at its cost: $0.00001 / cron job execution.

As this version allows users to set max response time, your cron jobs which are in queue will be executed within 120 seconds from set time. E.g, if it should run at 1:15, it may execute between 1:15:00 and 1:17:00.

Version 1.0 are still kept at old.setcronjob.com.

Basic HTTP Authentication

A bug on Basic HTTP Authentication has been fixed. 

If users try to create a cron job with URL containing username:password@, the URL becomes scheme://1domain.name/path.....

Thanks Fred for informing me :)

Set cron jobs with PHP scripts

Here are some tips to make your PHP script work perfectly:

Official tips

Add

<?php
set_time_limit(0);
ignore_user_abort(1);
?>

at beginning of your php file(s). This will let your script run until it finishes all jobs and doesn't care about users' stop button :)

Thanks Francesco for this tip :)

Personal tip

As most shared hosting disable functions set_time_limit and/or ignore_user_abort, you'd better don't output anything, or your output should be less than 4KB. Remember not to force your script to output (i.e using flush).

I tried it with shared hosting and my current server (LAMP), and my script which requires 150 seconds to complete works perfectly when set cron job at SetCronJob.

phpJobScheduler

phpJobScheduler is a PHP script that lets you create and execute cron jobs based on visitors.

As there're enough information at its home page, I won't tell too much about it :)

Here's the homepage link: http://www.phpjobscheduler.co.uk/

It's useful if you wanna create and manage your cron job by yourself without relying on other services.

Register now, and get 10,000 cron job executions for FREE!

From now on, when registering with SetCronJob, you'll get $0.10, or 10,000 FREE cron job executions.

Enjoy it!

Some small changes

- Remove captcha at Contact page when you're logging in.

- You must click on 'click' under ID/Name to enter name for new cron job.

- Add Tip at bottom of Control Panel.

- List some features at home page.

- Add Western Union as a payment method at Cron Hosting.

- Remove Send money feature, as nobody uses it.

- Please take time to let me know what you think :)

Connection time and response time

I've split Execution time into Connection time and Response time.

From now all, when viewing cron jobs' logs, you will see these two values.

For example, here's part of my logs for URL http://www.setcronjob.com/

Last execution time : Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:45:08 UTC
Connection time : 0.0144
Response time : 0.000835
Output:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:45:08 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Content-Length: 6195
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Language: en

.........

At SetCronJob, the max connection time is 3 seconds, and max response time is 2 seconds.

How to monitor a site with SetCronJob?

You can simply create a cron job at SetCronJob with interval you like, e.g every 5, 10, 15 minutes, then turn notification level to Fail (Failure). This will automatically enable Log features.

The price is as cheap as cron job: $0.00010 / check and $0.00010 / message (sent only when your site has problem).

The Basic HTML Control Panel!

I've added Basic HTML Control Panel.

With browser doesn't support or enable JavaScript, the Basic HTML version will automatically replace the Standard version. You can even create cron jobs with Lynx browser!

You can easily switch between two versions by clicking on 'Basic HTML' or 'Standard' link at date time line.

Get notified by email!

You can now receive notifications from SetCronJob when your cron jobs are executed.

There are 3 levels:

- Off: No notification (default)

- Fail (Failure): Only on fail.

- On (Always): Always send message.

When your cron jobs's notify level is Fail or On, the log feature will be automatically enabled.

Cost of a notification message is $0.00010, or 10,000 messages / $1.

So, when your cron jobs executed and a notification message was sent, it costs total $0.00020.

Recommended level is Fail (Failure), as this saves your money and my resources :)

Register and get more free cron!

From now all, when registering an account, you will get $0.05, or 5,000 FREE cron job executions (the old value is $0.01).

Enjoy it!

UPDATED: This stops after one week :) Now, you'll get $0.01 when registering with SetCronJob.
WHY? Because I love money $_$

UPDATED, again: Now you'll get $0.10 when registering with SetCronJob :)

Your accounts have been moved

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:00 to 12:00, all free accounts and cron jobs have been moved to new version.

The new balance is $0.5, or 50,000 cron executions.

Some accounts are deleted. If you have problem with logging in, feel free to contact me.

Nothing's changed with premium accounts.

Your account balance is less than $0.001

From now all, once your account balance is less than $1, $0.1, $0.01, $0.005, $0.001, you will receive an notifying email from SetCronJob. This will be sent only one time, and can be removed if you unchecked 'Receive emails from SetCronJob'.

Thanks Francesco for the suggestion.

View logs

You can check the log checkbox while create/save/enable cron job to let SetCronJob save the logs for you.

If a cron job have log enabled,  you can view logs by click on logs icon.

At the logs panel, you can edit, save/enable, delete, and view the output.

Logs can be useful to know why your cron job is disabled by my cron daemon.

Send money

You can now send money to your friend. Go to Control Panel > My account > Send money, enter amount (in dollar), username of receiver, then click Send. The receiver will get 95% of the amount.

An email will be sent to receiver to notify.

Change email address

You can now change your email address: Go to Control Panel > My account > Change email, enter new email, click Change.

An email will be sent to new email address. You must follow that link to complete.

If you didnot click on that link, your email will not be changed.

Some small changes

- Change the connection time out from 2 to 3 seconds.

- Account balance can be less than zero.

E.g, you have $0.00011, and create a cron job with log result option (this costs $0.00010). After the first execution (costs $0.00010), your account balance will be $-0.00009, and you can not create/save your cron jobs, your cron jobs will not be executed.

- When you disable or delete a cron job, $0.00001 will be released to your account.

- Change what SetCronJob promised, your script will be executed within 150 seconds from set time, e.g if your script should run at 1:00 AM, it can be executed between 1:00:00 and 1:02:30.

- Add cron job every 8 hours.

- Change the exchange rate:

If you pay $1 - $4, your account will be deposited 100% of the amount.
If you pay $5 - $9, your account will be deposited 105% of the amount.
If you pay $10 - $19, your account will be deposited 110% of the amount.
If you pay $20 - $49, your account will be deposited 115% of the amount.
If you pay $50 - $99, your account will be deposited 120% of the amount.
If you pay $100 or more, your account will be deposited 125% of the amount.

You can calculate at Cron Hosting plans.

- Definition of fail cron job: Unable to connection to HTTP server, or (apply with cron jobs log result only) URL doesn't return http status 200 OK.

- The new daemon has been created for old version with connection timeout is 3 seconds, too.

I dislike emails...

If you don't want to receive emails from SetCronJob, go to Control Panel > My account > Change preferences, uncheck 'Receive emails from SetCronJob', click 'Save preferences'.

After that, you will not receive emails entitled:

- Account balance downs to zero.

- Account balance less than $0.00x

- Cron job disabled.

Let's move!

The migration link has been added at old version control panel. You can now move to new version, and get benefits!

In fact, this process just deletes old account and cron jobs, then send a bonus to new account.

You must register new account, move your cron jobs before do this.

FREE account:

- At the moment, you can not create cron jobs.

- When move to new version, you will get 50,000 cron executions ($0.5).

- After 2009/09/20, all of your cron jobs will expire. Your account will be deleted later.

Premium account:

- You can continue to use your premium account as before.

- When move to new version, you will get $0.5 and  150% of the money you paid for. E.g if you pay $20 for gold account, you'll get $30.5, or 3,050,000 cron job executions.

- On 2009/09/20, the migration link will be removed.

Why I create new version?

Why I create new version? Because it's good for you and for me:

It's good for you:

- New daemon which uses less resources, and so that less outgoing connection that eat the network resources. So, your URL can execute properly.

- You have an option to log your URLs' output, which is more reliable.

- When register an account, you get FREE 1000 cron job executions, which is enough to launch one cron job daily in 3 years!

- You can set cron job every 5 minutes, which is available only with premium account at old version. Of course, this costs more.

- You pay for what you use, and what you need. E.g, if your script only need running every 30 minutes, you can set cron job every 30 minutes, and this costs only $0.00048 a day.

If you decide to use cron job every 5 minutes, you may see it costs x2 of old version price. A cron job every 5 minutes in 1 year executes 12*24*365 times ~ 100,000 times = $1. So, with $5, you can set only 5 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 1 year. But in fact, you may change your cron jobs every time you want, and spend less money!

- You can pay a smaller amount, e.g payment with just $1 is accepted. But you're encouraged to pay more than $5, as the fee of my payment gateway for small payment is too high.

Of course, it's good for me. If not, why did I upgrade it?

Updated things at SetCronJob version 2.0

Big changes:

- The price has changed from per year to per usage: $0.00001 / cron job execution, or 100,000 cron job execution / $1. When registering an account, you'll get $0.01, or 1000 cron execution, enough to have a cron job daily in 3 years!

- You can now view output of your cron jobs. Currently, time out is 2 seconds, and max data length is 3KB.

- New *special* cron daemon has been added. This daemon (I believe) will solve the problem with unreachable URLs (this prblm may come from too many HTTP outgoing connections). It uses less HTTP resources, more MySQL queries, has reasonable time usage, and should be faster.

Small changes:

- User passwords will be encrypted. Lost password feature will allow you to reset password.

- Adding some images at Control Panel.

- You can create unlimited number of cron jobs with minimum interval is 5 minutes. There's no expire day.

- Cron jobs which fails 3 consecutive times will be disabled.

- You can pay an amout which is multiple of $1,  e.g1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,... dollars.

Old version of SetCronJob

Currently, old version of SetCronJob is kept at http://old.setcronjob.com/

Free account cannot create cron jobs.

Premium account can create cron jobs, and cannot change account type.

Users cannot register new accounts nor upgrade current account.

SetCronJob 2.0

New version of SetCronJob has been created.

It will be introduced soon :)

Migration link will be added soon :)

Create cron jobs faster

I've just added new creating form.

With this, you can create your cron jobs faster, with a predefined time interval, e.g every 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, every 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 hours, etc.

Btw, I added a quota bar. You can hover it to see how many cron jobs are created and allowed. 

Name your cron jobs!

You can now name your cron jobs.

To create cron job with a name, simply enter some text in JobID field.

If you don't wanna create cron job with name, leave it blank "" or default "noname".

To rename a cron job, click on its name, enter new name, then click Save.

To remove name of a cron job, click on its name, delete it, then click Save.

If a cron job has name, the JobID field will display its name instead of ID.

This may be useful for who create lots of cron jobs, e.g 40, 100, 250 cron jobs.

Limitation: all characters instead of ', " and \ (these will be stripped), max length 10 characters.

With just $5...

With $5, you can:

- Create 10 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 13 months (Bronze account)

- Create 20 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 7 months (Silver account)

- Create 40 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 4 months (Gold account)

- Create 100 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 2 months 15 days (Diamond account)

- Create 250 cron jobs every 5 minutes in 1 months 22 days (Uranium account)

* You can convert 1 year Bronze account (costs $5) into 6 months Silver acct, or 3 months Gold acct, or 1.5 months Diamond acct, or 22 days Uranium account.

After your account expire, your cron jobs lifetime will be changed into 1 months.

So, total cron jobs lifetime = account lifetime + 1 months.

New premium accounts

I've added 2 premium account: Diamond and Uranium (!).

You can create 100 cron jobs with Diamond account, and 250 cron jobs with Uranium account.

Price: Diamond: $40/year, Uranium $80/year.

Switch to CronTab Control Panel

I've added link 'Switch to CronTab CP'. After clicking on this, you will get a control panel with fields like crontab syntax.

Check it :)

Cron jobs unreachable!

As I said, cron jobs unreachable will be deleted. However, this made a big problem: many users complained about deleting their cron jobs, which is ok when checked with SetCronJob.

So, I've make a small improvement: If your cron job is unreachable in 03 consecutive days, it will be disabled. To enable it, click Save and correct all error messages. It will not be deleted until expired.

Multiple cron jobs with same URL

From now on, all accounts can create multiple cron jobs with same URL. For example, you wanna set up some advanced cron jobs like cron job daily, every 15 minutes at 8, 9, 10 AM, you can create 3 cron jobs daily, every 15 minutes, at 8 AM, 9 AM, and 10 AM :)

At the same time, there's only one instance of your URL is executed. For example, you set 2 cron jobs: every 5 minutes and every 10 minutes, so the final result is your URL will be called only one time every 5 minutes. (I'm using SQL SELECT DISTINCT).

SetCronJob is a dirty spammer?

Onet.pl dislikes SetCronJob! They think I'm a dirty spammer :D

I've contacted them, and waiting for some response. However, you'd better register with email from a recommended webmail such as GMail, Yahoo mail, HotMail, etc.

UPDATED: They've replied me. This problem has been solved :) Thanks to this article, I've changed my host name to setcronjob.com. The restriction of email .onet.** has been removed :)

Resend activation mail

If you didnot receive any mail within 10 minutes, you can request activation mail.

In fact, it's always faster and better to contact me :D

Remove captcha at Account control panel

I've removed captcha (letters in image verifying) at My Account. You can now easily change password, change account type without getting trouble from captcha :D

Your account will be upgraded immediately!

From now on, right after making payment, your account will be upgraded!

However, your payment will be reviewed within 1 - 24 hours, and you'll be mailed when this is completed.

Unable to reach 000webhost.com

Some days ago, I noticed that a large number of 'This URL is unreachable' messages was produced.

So, I inserted a logging script to see what happen.

I found that this error occured when users set cron jobs with URL contains .comxa.com, .netne.net, .netau.net, .netii.net, .host22.com, etc. All of them is owned by 000webhost.com users with free account.

The problem, maybe, after a long time thinking and trying to fix, is 000webhost.com banned SetCronJob's IP / service:

- Can't ping their subdomain, e.g subsmith.comxa.com

- Can't lynx their website, e.g http://subsmith.comxa.com/

- Can't open their web site (using phpproxy).

This banned decision may be caused by SetCronJob opened too many connection to 000webhost.com users' website (too many users set cron jobs with web site hosted at 000webhost.com), and their firewall banned SetCronJob's IP (similar firewall is DDOS Deflate). 

It's a pity that 000webhost.com users can no longer use my service, but, if this is their decision, I can do nothing.

Sorry all 000webhost.com users :(

---

UPDATED: Look like CBA.pl banned SetCronJob, too :(

Premium account: new features

From now on, premium account at SetCronJob will have three features:

- No restriction of domain names and URL.

There's no restriction of domain name and URL. Set cron job with whatever you want!

- HTTPS is supported.

You can set cron job with URL start with https://
e.g https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

- Create muliple cron jobs with same URL*

For example, you can create cron jobs to launch your script every 10 and 15 minutes. So, it will execute at 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 45, 50 minute.

You'll no longer see 'This URL isalready in database.' message.

Happy setting up your cron jobs!

---
You can try all premium features with demo account. Username: demo, password: demo.

* This is now applied for all account :)

SetCronJob Mailer

As said before, SetCronJob is now using GMail as SMTP server to send mails.

When trying to log in, send mail, then quit many times, SetCronJob's mail box was temporarily blocked* by GMail. When I tried logging in with my browser, it required me to enter password as well as captcha (letters in image) before let me in.

A small improvement is re-use the SMTP connection. This helped a little when sending a lot of mails to notify cron jobs nearly expired or unreachable.

After all, I decided to code my own mailer daemon, which will check for new mails, then send them. It will be called every 5 minutes, and send maximum 20 emails once being called.

So, you may see a little (or, a big)  delay time before received messages from SetCronJob.

Let's make a calculation: if there're 100 emails in queue, and once being called, my mailer daemon sends only 20 emails. So, it will send all emails after being called 5 times, or 25 minutes.

So, please patient if you receive nothing after 5 minutes. Late is always better than nothing* :D

Sorry for any inconvenience.

---

* Today, this problem hang my mailer in 3 hours for nothing. Luckily, I'm there, kill it, then apply the 20 mails limitation. Let's see what happen tomorrow, when SetCronJob try to send mail notifying about cron jobs nearly expired.

Remove delete unactivated account link.

Some days ago, I include a delete link into activation mail, so that if somebody received unexpected message can simply delete that account.

The problem is some users click on it by mistake, and make their account deleted :(

I've removed that link. Sorry for any inconvinience.

Cron jobs nearly expired!

Today, I've set up cron jobs daily, at 01:05 AM GMT to send mail notfiying users with cron jobs nearly expired. First messages were sent at 12:17 GMT.

What to do when you have cron jobs nearly expired?

You can delete these cron jobs, and create new one. So, the cron jobs lifetime will be 1 month since created.

Or, you can upgrade your account, and get such benefits as cron jobs lifetime 1 year, or cron jobs every 5 minutes with only $5 for a year. It's cheap, isn't it? :D

EDITED: change execution time to 05:05 AM GMT.

EDITED: From July 18th, 2009, notifying messages will be sent when you have cron jobs expire on next x day, x=7, 5, 3, 2, 1.

Cron jobs unreachable will be deleted.

Cron jobs unreachable are cron jobs with URL that SetCronJob can't open a connection to its host. This may be caused by its host is not valid, domain name expired (dropped), its firewall blocked SetCronJob, or slow internet connection, etc.

For example, you set a cron job every 5 minutes with URL like http://unreachable.example.com/backup.php, and SetCronJob can't connect to unreachable.example.com within 2 seconds.

From July 15, 2009, all cron jobs unreachable will be deleted. This is an automatic process, and will be run every 5 days, at 07:35 AM GMT. So, the next execution should be at July 20, 2009, 07:35 AM GMT.

This is to save resources to execute other URLs faster, as cron jobs unreachable will take 2 seconds for nothing.

When your cron jobs are deleted, you'll received a message from SetCronJob. You can re-check whether your cron jobs are unreachable or not by go to that URL, set cron job with that URL, or check with web-sniffer.net, adfreeproxy.com, phpmyproxy.com.

If they're OK, please reply that message to inform me. I'll be appreciated for that.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and thank you for reading :)

When will you be e-mailed?

Thanks to GMail, all emails are now sent to users perfectly :)

When will you be emailed?

- Register an account, and SetCronJob will send you an email to activate your account. You must follow that link to confirm that you're the owner of that email adress.

- When you forgot username / password and fill the form at Lost Password page, your password will be sent to your email.

- Make a payment, and a thank-you message will be sent.

- After payment was verified, an Account upgraded (pass) / downgraded (fail) message will be sent.

- When your premium account expire, an email will be sent to inform you.

- When your cron jobs are nearly expire, SetCronJob will send you an email to notify.

- EDITED: When your cron jobs are deleted because of unreachable URL, you'll receive a message.

- When you contact me, I'll reply you.

- Sometimes I may wanna contact you, and I'll email you.

Except all above, you'll never be emailed.

Your payment will be processed faster now!

In the past, your account will be upgraded whenever your payment deposited into my account balance. This is advised by 2CheckOut, my payment gateway.

Sometime it takes a long time for money to be deposited, with PayPal is about 1 days, and with credit / debit cards is about 3 days.

As a vendor, I wanna be sure that the transaction has been completed perfectly before process account upgrading.

Thinking as a user, I want to upgrade my account as fast as possible. I paid for service, so WHY you make me wait for a long time?

So, from July 08, 2009, your account will be processed right after verified by 2CheckOut team. This takes only 6 - 24 hours to complete :)

EDITED: it often takes only 1 hour to complete :)

SetCronJob has new mailer!

Since July 08, 2009, SetCronJob will use GMail as SMTP server to send mail.

Hope this solves return mails problem.

---

EDITED: YES, this solves all mail problem.

From now on, accounts that registered with unreal emails will be manually deleted. (All unactivated account will automatically deleted after three days).

Problem with captcha at SetCronJob.

When I tried changing my password on FireFox, I keep getting error message "Please type 6 characters in the image.".

As this works as expected on Opera and Internet Explorer, I think there's a problem with FireFox. So, I check Error Console and read its error message.

The problem is FireFox complaints about getting directly value of input ID.

e.g <input type="text" id="txt" name="txt" value="some text" />

and if you use JavaScript like: alert(txt.value); you'll get an error.

However, this works: alert(document.getElementById('txt').value);

So, I corrected the script, and the problem has no reason to exist :D

Thanks Daphna for informing me this problem :)

Error messages explanation

When set cron job with your URL, you may see one of these messages:

- No need to set cron job with home page URL.

- This domain name is restricted.

Mentioned in Set cron job with a URL.

- This URL is restricted.

Your URL contains prohibited words. Read my Term of Service.

-Invalid URL. URL must start with http://, length from 12 to 200 characters.

The shortest URL, I think, will like http://a.bc/ (one character domain name with national extension), whose  length is only 12 characters. Normal URL length will be from 50 to 200 characters.

- This URL is unreachable.

This means SetCronJob cannot connect to your server (the connection time out is 2 seconds). You should have a look at your URL and make sure there's no http://http:// at begining of your URL, or some typos in domain name.

- This URL returns "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found"...

Your server don't found the page you try to set cron job. You may check typos in URL, or go directly to that URL by browser to see whether it works.

- This URL returns "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"...

- This URL returns "HTTP/1.1 302 Found"...

The two error messages above mean that your URL redirects to somewhere. You can fix that by enter directly your URL into browser, and when everything is loaded, copy the URL displayed on address bar, then set cron job with that URL.

- This URL returns "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden"...

Make sure your directory has index file, or your server / script allows SetCronJob to make request. The user agent of SetCronJob is SetCronJob/1.0 (+http://www.setcronjob.com/), and IP is 95.154.192.29.

- This URL returns "HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized"...

This URL require logging in. Make sure you entered correct username:password@ before domain name.

- Nothing else :D

Sorry for wrong message!

Hi all,

Today when I let my script automatically check database and inform users about nearly expired cron jobs, I've made a mistake so that it send to (nearly) all users and say that they have nearly expired cron jobs.

I'm so sorry for that message. It's my fault.

Your cron jobs will not be deleted until it expired. The expire day shown in Control Panel will always be correct.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and thank you for reading.

Please note that emails sent from webmaster@setcronjob.com are automatic messages. However, you can simply reply those messages if you want to contact me. Your reply will be automatically send to my current mailbox nguyenanthuan@gmail.com, which I often check once a day.

Regards,

SetCronJob.

Set cron job with a URL

In SetCronJob, URL to call must have this structure:

http://user:pass@domain.com:port/path.ext?query=value
things in italic are optional.

- HTTP only.

HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, etc are not allowed.

- User name and password are supported.

If your URL require HTTP Authentication, simply add user:pass@ before domain name.

- All domain extensions are allowed.

You can add URL with domain.com, .net, .org, .co.uk, ..., .co.cc, .uni.cc, etc. There're some domain names restricted, such as google.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com, ...

- All ports are allowed.

Recommended ports are 80 (default), 8080 (HTTP Alternative), ...

- Must have either path or query.

It's often no need to set cron job with home page, e.g http://example.com/.

http://example.com/?q=backup (home page but have query), http://example.com/backup.php (has path), http://example.com/backup.php?mode=all&sendto=webmaster (has path and query) are allowed.

- All file extensions are allowed.

You can set cron job with file.php, .asp, .aspx, .py, .pl, .cgi, .html, .html, etc

- Fragment will be trimmed.

If your URL end with #fragment, e.g http://example.com/backup.php#useless, the #useless will be trimmed. The final URL will be http://example.com/backup.php. As fragment is used only by browser, web server don't know what fragment is inserted, so it's no need to add #fragment to your URL.

Next post: How to fix error messages like This URL is unreachable or This URL returns "HTTP/1.1....

What SetCronJob promised

SetCronJob promised:

- 99.9% uptime
One month has 30*24*60*60 = 2592000 seconds, and 0.1% of this is 2592 seconds, or ~ 43 minutes downtime in one month. This is to maintain scripts, httpd, server, etc.

- 99.0% your script will be executed within 60 seconds from set time.
E.g your script should be executed at 1:15 AM. So, it may be executed at time between 1:15:00 and 1:15:59 AM. 

- 99.5% script will be executed
Your script will be executed whenever your web server is up, allows SetCronJob to call script, and your script returns status HTTP/1.1 200 OK. The connection time out is 2 seconds.

- 99.0% number of times your script will be executed.
One days, my cron daemon will be launched (60/5)*24 = 288 times. SetCronJob promised 286 times a day (down 2*30=60 times a month).


This is promise for both free and paid service. Above numbers are what I did promise. The real values may be higher.

List of FREE cron jobs!

Cron jobs is defined as a scheduling software in Unix/Linux that can call your script periodically, e.g every 5 minutes.

All of us may need cron jobs for backing up files, databases, send emails, clear temporary files, RSS sync,... But most web hosting providers do limit or disable cron jobs feature due to high server load or memory usage.

So, if you need cron jobs like crazy, and are looking for an online cron service, here's the best list for you:

- SetCronJob http://www.setcronjob.com/

- OnlineCronJobs http://www.onlinecronjobs.com/

- CronJobs.org http://www.cronjobs.org/

- getCron http://getcron.com

- WebBasedCron http://www.webbasedcron.com/

- WebCron.org http://www.webcron.org/

- ezCronTab http://ezcrontab.com/

Have fun with this list!

Set Cron Job now has favicon.ico

After a long time, SetCronJob doesn't have a favicon icon. From June 27, 2009, a favicon has been added.

It's just a part of SetCronJob's banner, created with MS-Paint :D

What do you use cron jobs for?

Hi,

After a long time thinking and asking people what they do with cron jobs, here's the list of purposes:
- Back up files
- Back up databases
- Delete temporary files and folders
- Send mail
- Auto blogging
- Execute RapidLeech (restricted in Term Of Service)
- Generate invoices
- RSS sync
-...

If you use cron jobs for other purposes, let me know!

Cron jobs sandbox

Although SetCronJob's control panel is very simple, but it may not be easy to use. Someone don't know how to set cron jobs properly.

So, SetCronJob now introduces Cron Jobs SandBox, which looks exactly like form in Control Panel. You can use Cron Jobs SandBox to check when your cron jobs execute.

This page is created with JavaScript, so your page will not be reloaded.

This may be very useful for you! Check it out!

Cron jobs every x days!

From June 2009, SetCronJob began support cron jobs every x days, include every day, every 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 days.

So, from now on, SetCronJob supports:
- Cron jobs every x minutes (x = 5, 10, 15, 20, 30)
- Cron jobs every x hours (x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12)
- Cron jobs every x days (x = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10)
- Cron jobs weekly
- Cron jobs monthly
- Cron jobs yearly (who need?)

Happy setting your cron jobs!

How to disable a cron job?

Simply click on Disable icon. Your cron job will be disabled, and no longer be executed.

For Unix/Linux users, you can simply edit your crontab file (using crontab -e), and add # at beginning of cron job line you wanna disable.

For example, you have this cron job:

*/5 * * * * lynx http://example.com/backup.php

And you wanna disable it. Change it into:

#*/5 * * * * lynx http://example.com/backup.php

About SetCronJob

Cron jobs is a good feature in web hosting that allows you to call a URL periodically. It's so useful to back up your files, database, clear temporary files, etc.

Unfortunately, not all web hosting allow you to use cron jobs. Some will suspend your account if it takes too much server load and memory usage.

Go to Set Cron Job, and you'll have a good alternative for cron jobs, include many features:
- You can create 10 - 40 cron jobs
- Minimum interval: 5 minutes
- Simple, fast, easy to use control panel with one click to create, edit & save, delete cron jobs
- One click to change account type and renew cron jobs.
- Cron jobs will expire after one year.

It's also cheap:
- Free account was provided lifetime.
- Upgrade whenever you need more cron jobs.
- Starting price: $5/year

With free account:
- Create up to 5 cron jobs.
- Minimum interval: 10 minutes.
- Cron jobs will expire after 1 months.

Simply goes here: www.setcronjob.com and register an account for free!