7 Great Years, Looking Forward to #8!

Hi everyone,

Seven years ago in November we created WebBasedCron. It’s been a great 7 years serving you and we look forward to many more.

Happy Holidays,
WebBasedCron

Improved Email Infrastructure

At WebBasedCron we’re big fans of great companies that help solve difficult problems for small businesses. We use many of these companies for WebBasedCron, which ensures the reliability and up-time you’ve come to expect. These companies include PEER1/ServerBeach for our servers, Zendesk for our support ticketing system and now SendGrid for our email infrastructure. SendGrid is a fantastic company that removes the complexity of sending emails and making sure they don’t get caught by spam filters. If you have any comments or questions about any of these companies, just ask.

Take care,
George

6 Years Old, Going On 7!

Hi everyone,

This past November we celebrated our 6th birthday. Thank you to our loyal customers for your continued support. If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. All the best in 2011.

Take care,
George
WebBasedCron

Announcing the New WebBasedCron Support Area

Hi everyone,

For a while now we’ve been thinking about how we could improve customer service and help people ask questions and learn more about WebBasedCron quickly and easily. We quickly learned that great tools already existed, and the smartest thing to do was to leverage these tools.

So to build our new Cron Support Area we used an innovative company called Zendesk. Zendesk is built upon the idea that help desk support doesn’t have to be complicated and cumbersome. Companies like Twitter, MSNBC, Scribd, and many more use Zendesk to improve customer service – and now, so do we!

You can use our new Cron Support Area to submit support requests, ask questions in our forums, and more – go ahead and take a look – let us know what you think.

Take care,
George
WebBasedCron

Server Status Tuesday January 12 2010

Update (2:35pm): PEER1 has fixed the problem. Everything should be back to normal. Our apologies for the trouble. The total downtime was roughly 30 minutes.

Our infrastructure hosting provider PEER1 is currently experiencing a network issue in our data center at LAX. The problem occurred at just after 2pm EST. They are aware of the problem and working to fix it now. We will update this post as more information becomes available.

Our apologies for the trouble,
WebBasedCron

Our Birthday – 5 Years Old, Going on 6

Hi everyone,

This past week we celebrated our 5th birthday. We’ve come a long way from the beginning and I sincerely want to thank our loyal customers for trusting us as their cron hosting provider. Our move to PEER1 Networks in August was a good one. Our stability and up-time since then has been 100% and we don’t expect that to change. We look forward to serving you in the years to come and hope everyone has a safe and happy holidays. All the best in 2010.

Thanks,
George
WebBasedCron

Server Status August 28

Our apologies for the trouble, but our infastructure hosting provider experienced issues today from roughly 2am to 6am EST. This problem has been resolved and everything is back to normal.

Sorry for any trouble,
George
Web Based Cron

New Load Balancer (Update)

Update 11am: Some of you may have also continued to experience problems this morning. This was due to a slight oversight on our behalf when applying certain tuning parameters. Everything should be back to normal. If anyone is experiencing any problems please contact us. Our apologies for any trouble.

Hi everyone,

We deployed a new cron load balancer yesterday to WebBasedCron that is meant to help us scale as we grow. Unfortunately there were some problems and some of you may have experienced problems with your cron jobs. The problem has been fixed and everything is back to normal. If anyone is experiencing any problems please contact us via WebBasedCron.com.

Our apologies for any trouble,
Web Based Cron

Fighting Spam with ReCAPTCHA

For those that don’t know, a CAPTCHA is the image you see when filling out a form that you’re required to type out. The main purpose for these images is to fight spam. The term was coined in 2000 by Carnegie Mellon University and stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

ReCAPTCHA is a fantastic (free) CAPTCHA service designed also by Carnegie Mellon University that allows a website to protect themselves against spam. For example, now when a user goes to Register or submit a Support Request on WebBasedCron, they’ll see something like this:

To submit the form, the user will need to type in the text correctly. The best part about ReCAPTCHA is that by fighting spam it’s also helping to digitize books. You can learn more about it here, but basically the words displayed in the images are taken directly from real books. A fantastic innovation on an originally great idea.

Web Based Cron