Monday, March 14, 2016

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.