SetCronJob Billing Update

Hello,

We're working on revising SetCronJob system, and there will be more changes coming soon.

Make one-time payment via FastSpring

When you upgrade/renew your account, we only accepted PayPal payment. PayPal has a limited list of supported countries, so we've just added FastSpring payment gateway. They'll process payments from many more countries, as well as support other payment methods like credit/debit card, Amazon payment, wire transfer, etc.

To make a one time payment via FastSpring, visit Account > Payments, click Make a one-time payment.

Enter your desired amount to pay

After entering your desired amount, click Make a payment, and you'll be redirected to FastSpring to complete your payment. The payment will be reviewed manually before processed. The credit will be applied to your account balance, that you can use to upgrade/renew your plan directly.

Update your plan directly

You can now update your plan directly using remaining credit and account balance. No extra payment required. This will be handy in case you want to change your plan after upgraded.

You will need to cancel your current PayPal subscription first (at Account > Payments); then visit Account > Plans, click Subscribe on desired plan, and select Update plan directly.

Click Update plan to change your plan

If you have any question or feature suggestion, please feel free to email me.

SetCronJob is now operated by Develover

On August 20, 2016, I registered my own company named Develover Company Limited, based in Vietnam. From now own, SetCronJob will be owned and operated by my company.

If you have any question, please feel free to email me.

Best regards,

Nguyen An Thuan.

SetCronJob is updated

Hello all,

I've just rewritten SetCronJob code base with a new framework. There are some minor changes, while most core features and settings are kept intact. If you encounter any problem, please try reload the page (hit Ctrl - F5), or contact me if that doesn't work.

New cronjob editing form

New cronjob editing form

I simplified and categorized all the fields into subsections demonstrating how SetCronJob works: Basic settings (cronjob URL and time settings), Connect to your server, Send HTTP request (HTTP method and post data), Detect failure and notify you, Name and group, and Advanced settings (just for me doing some special stuff with specified cronjobs).

One address (contact information) for one account

Since I don't see the actual needs with multiple addresses, I just simplified it. You can update your contact information at Account > Update info. The contact information will be included in the PDF invoice too.

URL parameter in API requests is deprecated

Now you should only send POST (recommended) or GET request directly to our API functions e.g. like this
https://www.setcronjob.com/api/cron.list?token=******
The URL parameters e.g.
https://www.setcronjob.com/api/cron.list/token/******
will not be supported. For backward compatibility, it will be redirected to GET requests.

Updated pricing and plans

Currently I've only increased the max execution logs for Platinum and Diamond plans. More good changes will be coming soon :-)

Help center is coming

I removed the FAQ (frequently asked questions) page, and added the Help Center at https://support.setcronjob.com/. If you have any question, just ask me, and if it's a common problem, I'll add it to the Help Center.

HostGator blocked our IP addresses

UPDATED on Mar 27, 2016: Well, 4 out of 5 new servers have been blocked by HostGator again. That is it. SetCronJob now stops supporting HostGator users. If your website is hosted at HostGator, you should either move to other hosting providers, or use other online cronjob services. You can always request a refund of your payment at Billing > Payments.

UPDATED on Mar 26, 2016: We added 5 new servers and moved all blocked cronjobs there. They're all working fine now. Our 3 old IP addresses are also unblocked.

SetCronJob's IP addresses have been being blocked by HostGator's firewall for days. If your sites are hosted at HostGator, you can see this error message

Access denied.  Your IP address is blacklisted.  If you feel this is in error please contact your hosting provider's abuse department.

in cronjobs' execution results.

A client has confirmed that HostGator blocked us because we exceeded their PHP request rate limit. And they won't unblock until the requests stop.

So, currently we'll disable all cronjobs for sites hosted at HostGator. I'll update when they unblock our IP addresses.

To prevent this from happening again, please lower your cronjob's execution interval, especially when your websites are hosted at shared hosting providers. Most cronjobs don't require cronjob every minute to work. You can set it to run every 10 minutes instead, or contact me for advice.

You should also contact HostGator and ask them if they can whitelist our IP addresses:

• 50.116.9.254
• 74.207.250.230
• 45.33.48.85

We also consider adding more servers / IP addresses later to spread the load.

SetCronJob is high availability now!

After 3 servers are added, there were several issues that caused SetCronJob unstable. We were working really hard to fix, improve and upgrade our servers and application.

The service is stabilized after a few days, and we're still monitoring and working on it. Until now, we can proudly announce that SetCronJob is high availability. We removed all single point of failure, including:
- Web server: we're using round robin DNS, so if one web server is down, your browser will retry the request at another server. There will be some delay time (e.g. 30 seconds, tested on my browser), but it's not a big problem. As long as you can access our website, and the cronjobs are executed properly, it's no big deal.
- Cronjob processor: all cronjobs are distributed to all servers to be processed. If one server is down, the other cronjob processor can still handle all the cronjobs properly. Actually just one server is powerful enough to handle all cronjobs. Network failure is automatically detected, so any server has any network problem, it'll be temporarily removed until everything is fine and it can process cronjob properly again.
- Database server: we have synchronous database replication, automatic failure detection and failover, load balancer. No more database down!

With this set up, SetCronJob is now the most reliable online cronjob service. We're processing 3.8 millions cronjobs a day, or 2,600 cronjobs per minute, or 44 cronjobs per second. And the service is already scaled up and out so that it can handle up to x3 times than those numbers :-)

Happy setting up cronjobs!

SetCronJob stops offering new free accounts

Hi all,

The free account offer has been being there since SetCronJob started in 2009, and it's finally time for us to kiss it goodbye. Starting at Jan 18, 2016, we'll no longer offer free account for new users.

All existing free users can continue using their accounts until Jan 18, 2017. After that we'll remove the free plan completely.

If you need any help, or have any question, please feel free to email me.

Best regards,
Nguyen An Thuan.

3 new servers are being deployed

Hi all,

We're very pleased to announce that 3 new servers are being deployed to achieve High Availability. With this deployment, we can minimize service downtime. When one or even two servers fail, the others can still handle all cronjobs processing, and we can easily stop, add or remove any server for maintenance or upgrade.

When will the deployment complete?

The deployment will be started at 2:00 AM, Monday, January 25, 2016, UTC. Estimated time: 2 hours. Duration that time, we'll copy the whole database into new servers' database. We'll also disable most of our website functions to keep the user data intact.

What are new server IP addresses?

We'll still use the same IP addresses from one year ago, except that we'll replace the IP address 173.255.210.98 with 45.33.48.85. We'll be sending emails from these 3 new servers, while the IP address 173.255.210.98 get blacklisted at SpamRats. They blacklisted the whole Class C IP address (means 173.255.210.*), and that can't be helped.

We can't keep the IPv6 addresses, so we'll use 3 new IPv6 addresses too. So here are 3 new servers' IP addresses:

• Server 1: 50.116.9.254 - 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fef1:a819
• Server 2: 74.207.250.230 - 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fef1:33bf
• Server 3: 45.33.48.85 - 2600:3c01::f03c:91ff:fef1:31a2

All servers are in Fremont, California, USA.

Are there anything else changed?

Besides one new IPv4 address and 3 new IPv6 addresses, we also remove the server selection feature. It's already removed now for newly created cronjobs, and existing cronjobs with no server selected.

All cronjobs will be processed randomly from 3 new servers, and you can't change that. It's to make sure the 3 servers are load balanced, and when one server is down, your cronjobs can still be executed by other servers as well.

Will my cronjobs be affected?

For most of cases, no. Your cronjobs will be executed properly, with no downtime. Here are some cases that your cronjobs may be affected because of the IP addresses changed:

• Your hosting provider's firewall may block our (new) IP addresses
  Please contact your hosting provider and ask them to whitelist our new IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
• Your CDN firewall may block our IP address
  Please update your CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare) settings to add our IP addresses to its whitelist. Contact the CDN support staff if you're not sure how to do it.
• Your server firewall may block our IP addresses
  Do the same thing: add our IP address into your firewall whitelist.
• Your script may block our new IP address
  If you only allow some IP addresses to trigger your script, please update your script so it'll accept our new IP addresses.

If your cronjobs may be affected like these cases, you should resolve it now. After Jan 25, the change will be applied and your cronjobs may not work.

If you think your affected case is not listed here, leave a comment below or contact me.

How can I know if my cronjobs are affected?

- If your server firewall blocks our requests, we won't able to connect to your server. In the cron execution results, you will see the connection error messages, e.g. "connection time-out" or "connection refused". If that's the case, please contact your hosting provider and ask them to whitelist our IP addresses.
If you didn't contact your hosting provider regarding their firewall, and they haven't ever block our IP addresses, then it's very likely that they won't block our new IP addresses. So, nothing to worry.
- If you needed to add our IP addresses to your script whitelist before, just add our new IP addresses to it now, and that's it.

Best regards,
Nguyen An Thuan.