Webcron.org
After I wrote my last article on Cron for Web 2.0, I did a bit more searching and found webcron.org. It's very close to what I described and in my looking through the site, they apparently have about 10,000 users which is quite something.
I figure the market for this is anyone who has a cheap shared webhosting account and needs to schedule regular maintenance. They've been around for 4+ years so how's that for being ahead of the Web 2.0 curve!
They have a highly visible warning when you're signing up not to use the service to simulate clicks though I doubt it's very good for doing such a thing. Imagine all of your clicks coming from a small set of IP addresses and at a highly predicatable schedule. Not too stealthy!
A couple things to note about the site. It doesn't have any support for authentication which is something I would want to use were I to be doing system management tasks remotely.
When I was looking at the site at 12:02 AM PST, it stopped responding. I wonder if the webserver is also the cron server and just how long the queue for web requests takes to complete on the hour requests.
When I first loaded it, it was in French and the button to switch to English is hidden below. They might do well to detect the user's country and display the appropriate language.
Lastly, I wonder if there's any feedback mechanism to the site. Were I to develop something similar I would probably generate a small piece of code that could be pasted into the end of the user's scripts so I would know they finished successfully. Then maybe try up to 3 times to increase reliability.
Anyway, if you're looking to schedule some tasks on a non-cron-enabled web site, you might check out webcron.org.
I figure the market for this is anyone who has a cheap shared webhosting account and needs to schedule regular maintenance. They've been around for 4+ years so how's that for being ahead of the Web 2.0 curve!
They have a highly visible warning when you're signing up not to use the service to simulate clicks though I doubt it's very good for doing such a thing. Imagine all of your clicks coming from a small set of IP addresses and at a highly predicatable schedule. Not too stealthy!
A couple things to note about the site. It doesn't have any support for authentication which is something I would want to use were I to be doing system management tasks remotely.
When I was looking at the site at 12:02 AM PST, it stopped responding. I wonder if the webserver is also the cron server and just how long the queue for web requests takes to complete on the hour requests.
When I first loaded it, it was in French and the button to switch to English is hidden below. They might do well to detect the user's country and display the appropriate language.
Lastly, I wonder if there's any feedback mechanism to the site. Were I to develop something similar I would probably generate a small piece of code that could be pasted into the end of the user's scripts so I would know they finished successfully. Then maybe try up to 3 times to increase reliability.
Anyway, if you're looking to schedule some tasks on a non-cron-enabled web site, you might check out webcron.org.
posted by David at
11:47 PM
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://davidsterry.com/images/fsf.png){kind=small}
3 Comments:
check www.cronmanager.com
Similar and more reliable scripting
By
Anonymous, At
12/30/07, 2:16 AM
Webcron.org changed quit a bit. it offers notification by email, sms and rss feed, has a proper english version. It also supports three time-outs: 30, 180 and 600 seconds.
The downside: it's a paid service now but at 0,0001 per execution it might be the cheapest thing available on the web ;-)
By
Unknown, At
10/2/08, 6:39 AM
http://www.willemijns.com/cronjob.htm
By
willemijns, At
8/30/09, 1:46 AM
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