Web Based Cron Blog

Announcing the New WebBasedCron Support Area

webbasedcron — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:05:22 +0000

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

webbasedcron — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:11:38 +0000

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

webbasedcron — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:24:59 +0000

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

Moving to PEER1 (ServerBeach) Networks

webbasedcron — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:54:59 +0000

Update Aug 30: The move was completed successfully. Everything should be running normal. If you experience any issues please contact us here.

Hi everyone,

Saturday night beginning at 12am EST we will be transitioning WebBasedCron’s servers from Bell Canada to ServerBeach (A PEER1 company). This will dramatically improve the reliability of WebBasedCron. Though the servers will now be located on the West Coast, the timezone will be set to Eastern Standard Time, so your cron jobs will run as expected. We appreciate your business and thank you for choosing WebBasedCron.

If you have any questions please contact us.

Thank you,
George
Web Based Cron

Server Status August 28

webbasedcron — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:05:12 +0000

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)

webbasedcron — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:38:22 +0000

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

Server Status August 11

webbasedcron — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:16:47 +0000

Update 2:35pm: Everything is back to normal. Our apologies for any trouble.

We are currently experiencing an issue with our infrastructure hosting. The current time is 1:16pm EST. We will update this post shortly with more information.

Our apologies for any trouble,
Web Based Cron

Server Status May 3rd

webbasedcron — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:49:18 +0000

We are currently experiencing an issue that we are working to resolve. The current time is 1:51pm Pacific Time.

Update (5:03pm Pacific Time): The issue was found with be with our infastructure hosting providers DNS servers. Because of this some of you may have been unable to access WebBasedCron.com. That said, cron job still continued to run. They are working to fix the problem and everything should be back to normal soon.

Thank you for your patience,
George
WebBasedCron

Fighting Spam with ReCAPTCHA

webbasedcron — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:27:48 +0000

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

Checking Server Status On-Demand

webbasedcron — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:52:41 +0000

Hi everyone,

As you probably read in our previous post, this morning we experienced an infrastructure issue that caused WebBasedCron to go down for short period of time. The problem was fixed and everything is back to normal. A great comment was made requesting a way to monitor the status of WebBasedCron without needing to go to the site.

That said, I created a service which monitors WebBasedCron on an external server with the results shown here: http://status.webbasedcron.co.uk. You can also subscribe to the status using this RSS feed . Please keep in mind the time displayed by the status URL is in UTC.

Thanks,
George
Web Based Cron