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Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

cron.io

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Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#33

Post by theon144 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
coenhyde wrote: post #2

I created this service to solve my own problems. Setting up system crons can get real annoying when you have multiple app servers.

Suggestion: Add a notify-on-failure attribute to cron jobs. If cron fails, notify via email or SMS.

And since SMS cost money, this could be a paid service, I'm sure people would pay for it, and it might turn up enough to sustain itself.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#34

Post by fsckin »

theon144 wrote: post #33
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggestion: Add a notify-on-failure attribute to cron jobs. If cron fails, notify via email or SMS.

And since SMS cost money, this could be a paid service, I'm sure people would pay for it, and it might turn up enough to sustain itself.

Most major providers have email to SMS gateways, which make it basically free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#35

Post by shingen »

Yes it should be a full service.

I particularly hate the existing web cron services, like webbasedcron.com and others. They're poorly designed, poorly run, and poorly supported. Just looking at most of their sites you can tell they suck.

I'd pay at least $30 / month for an industrial grade web cron service (with 20 or 30 cron jobs, that can be run per minute, with variable failure thresholds), with a decent interface.

I've thought about building one, but I can't find the time to throw at another project. It'd be great if someone would do it.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#36

Post by iambot »

coenhyde wrote: post #16
eps wrote: post #15

Would creating 60 jobs polling the same URL at 1 min intervals translate to the site getting polled every second? Or is there batching/coalescing of the same-URL jobs?

The crons are spaced out over time. This is actually why i took so long to launch the site. I've used the prototype version of this for a long time. The app is written in node so it is incredibly fast, like destroy the internet fast. That is why email confirmations are required and accounts are limited to 5 crons each. I will add a captcha on account confirmation shortly as well.

> The app is written in node so it is incredibly fast, like destroy the internet fast.

haha I actually like that line a lot. Describes exactly how I feel whenever I'm using node.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#37

Post by meiji »

I think you could arguably charge based on frequency. Weekly job -> free. Daily job -> 10c a month, Hourly 50c a month, more than that, pick a price. Definitely useful but then you're also going to need a way to make it a distributed service because people aren't going to want to have it not work because your single Amazon instance has tanked. The number of businesses who have problems because timed jobs don't kick off is insane and this might do the trick but you need to avoid moving that pain point from their own systems to you.

Re: Show HN: Cron.io - Sharing a by-product. Should this be a full service?

#38

Post by M83 »

namsral wrote: post #28

I released a similar project on Github called Torpedo. It lets you schedule HTTP callbacks via a REST API. curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:7931/api/callbacks/ \ -d "url=http://example.com/messages/1/send/" \ -d "eta=2012-03-25T08:00:00Z" The above will call " http://example.com/messages/1/send/ at 8am on the 25th of March. https://github.com/namsral/torpedo

great idea, thanks for that!
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