Webcron.org

Thursday 15 December 2005 - Filed under Default

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.

2005-12-15  »  David Sterry