Custom cron job timeout

Today we added a new feature to EasyCron - customizing cron job timeout.

In our previous cron job executing program, we always used your plan's default timeout as timeout limit. But in a few situations, you may want to change the timeout setting.

For example, if you don't want your cron job to run overlappingly, instead of setting max execution time in your script, you could also set the timeout limit at EasyCron. Once the configured timeout is reached, EasyCron will disconnect the connection between itself and your server, and your cron job script could detect the client side abortion and terminate the execution, so next execution could come without conflicting with previous execution(s).

Another possible use case for custom timeout is, if you know the legitimate maximum execution time of your cron job script/program, you may want to restrict the execution to a specific duration, so that any unexpected long time execution will be cancelled then.

Other uses include but not limit to, if you're going to use EasyCron as a monitoring service, you could set a deadline to the max response time cost; preventing proxy timeout, etc..

Custom cron job timeout

We hope that you could find this new feature useful.

Email notification optimization

As too many emails sending out from EasyCron has resulted in some problems, we has reduced the amount of email notices by changing the email notice triggering mechanism.

The main problems caused by frequently emailing are:

1) Many email service providers deem us as SPAM sender, block our emails (or/and IPs) constantly. This has brought big trouble to EasyCron and our users. For example, many expired users could not receive expiry email notices and didn't renew their accounts on time; some crucial cron jobs failed but didn't receive attention, and so on.

2) Some users' email box were filled up by emails sent by us.

3) The credit and authority of our domain and IPs descends as black listing done by other parties.

4) Our email server keeps being hit by huge amount of bounced emails from recipients.

Now EasyCron sends out email notices only when:

1) starts failing, or

2) returns to success from failure.

That is to say, if your cron job fails consecutively for more than one time, only one failure email notice will be sent to you.

You could also specify a "sensitivity" setting to configure only after how many consecutive failures that the failure notice will get sent.

Email notification and failure threshold

If in some cases, you really need to be notified for each failure or execution of your cron job, you could utilize the "webhook" feature.

Placeholders you could use in cron job URL

EasyCron added placeholder support in cron job URL today.

You could use placeholders:
__RANDOM__
__TIMESTAMP__
in your cron job URL.

__RANDOM__ will be replaced with a random 12-digit integer when your cron job is fired.
And __TIMESTAMP__ will be replaced with unix timestamp.

For example, URL
http://www.example.com?__RANDOM__
could finally be http://www.example.com?123456789000 when it's fired.

Random integer or timestamp in URL will prevent EasyCron's requests from hitting cache in your proxy or server.