Cron.io
Infrastructure
hosted cron scheduling
SHOW HN2012
153points
70comments
#123of 1,677 in 2012
Top 8%of 2012 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
16 positive, 13 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 5 critical, out of 37 comments about the project. Thread score +0.35.
Idea: 8 for, 1 againstDocs: 5 for, 0 againstPricing: 2 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clean documentation and styling
From 3 comments
Very cool. And kudos on the clean documentation.
brikis98 on HNGreat site, simple and gets the product across well. It might be nice to have some examples of what the service could be used for, why it is/will be better than setting up cron…
tommoor on HNI agree. Nicely styled, easy to read, and a great, well thought out API structure. If I was looking to hire, this entire project would shout HIRE HIM!
junto on HN
Useful for hosted apps and shared hosting without cron access
From 3 comments
Yes! I currently have a server ran specifically for managing my cron tasks, I would love to outsource it to a reliable company. If you could guarantee reliability then I'd love…
citricsquid on HNThis would be great, there are services like Heroku that provide nearly "free hosting" but have horrible cron job support unless you pay like 10 bucks a month for it. Be nice to…
overshard on HNI've used web-based cron services in the past for projects on shared hosting that doesn't offer decent cron support. This would've been a godsend; most are downright terrible or…
mintplant on HN
Objections
Techies can edit crontab easily; little added value
From 1 comment
For most people, the URLs these jobs are hitting will be calling code that they themselves have written, is that right? If so, since I'm writing a bunch of code to do work, the…
tlianza on HN
Security concern: password sent over HTTP
From 2 comments
Yeah, I cringed when I saw the password-over-http part. Fine for a free service, not for paid.
icebraining on HNIf cron.io is made into a paid service, i would suggest using HTTPS for the API.
sharken on HN
Abuse and DoS risk from fast cron requests
From 1 comment
Do tell me you are checking robots.txt then. This has a great potential for DoS, email confirmations or not.
eps on HN
Requests
HTTPS for the API
From 2 comments
If cron.io is made into a paid service, i would suggest using HTTPS for the API.
sharken on HNGiven the documented auth mechanism, I'd say this is a requirement.
tlianza on HN
Retry failed calls
From 2 comments
Definitely a good idea! The only thing that would make me hesitant to use this service is that you are at the mercy of any kind of network outages between your servers and mine.…
ecaroth on HNOne thing I love about Mailgun is that they keep retrying POSTs to our URL if it doesn't respond with a 200 status code. It adds a nice level of reliability to our email…
qeorge on HN
Failure notifications
From 2 comments
Suggestion: Add a notify-on-failure attribute to cron jobs. If cron fails, notify via email or SMS.
toomuchtodo on HNConsider this feature which I've thought about building myself at times. With the cron request a token/guid/hash can be passed along with the job which is unique to the request.…
noinput on HN
Flexible schedule formats
From 1 comment
What I'd expect from this modern service to offer alternative cron period formats e.g: every 24 min, every hour, every other tuesday 3pm.
alpb on HN
Questions
Should it be a paid full service and what pricing is reasonable
From 4 comments
I think I'd pay for the convenience and reliability, but I hope you'd have a small pricing option. I'd use <5 jobs at any one time, and probably wouldn't want to pay more than…
chad_oliver on HNI would pay for this provided it was reliable and relatively cheap. $1/cron, for e.g.
paulitex on HNI would pay $0.10 per X cron requests (a la AWS pricing). $1/cron? Above $10-20/month, I'd just write it myself.
toomuchtodo on HNI 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…
meiji on HN
Reliability and distributed hosting
From 2 comments
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…
meiji on HNYes! I currently have a server ran specifically for managing my cron tasks, I would love to outsource it to a reliable company. If you could guarantee reliability then I'd love…
citricsquid on HN
Alternatives named
webcron.org
From 1 comment
I've been using webcron.org for a few projects, works well enough, but my most important criteria is price for something this simple. It's really cheap, $0.00014 per request.
aaronlidman on HN
Torpedo (GitHub HTTP callback scheduler)
From 1 comment
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…
namsral on HN
CloudQuartz
From 1 comment
We released a web based cron with RESTful API and web UI recently called CloudQuartz. You can find it at http://www.thecloudblocks.com
ksajadi on HN
webbasedcron.com
From 1 comment
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.…
shingen on HN