Domain on hold accident

We're very sorry for an accident happened during (about)
2015-10-08 16:00 UTC
to
2015-10-09 21:00 UTC.

During this period, our main domain easycron.com got a "Registrar-Hold" (ClientHold) status due to inaccurate whois data. This hold was set by the domain registrar enom (enom.com).

A "Registrar-Hold" (ClientHold) status means that all the resolution of the domain will be (and have to be) disabled by the registrar. Our direct domain registrar is namecheap.com, and its upstream provider is enom.com. The status change was done by enom.com, and namecheap was asked to stop the resolution of our domain.

We started to observe the abnormality at 2015-10-08 17:00 UTC. From that time, our website and API failed to respond, and our monitoring system sent out alert, though our cron job executing engine is independent to the DNS and still working fine.

One of our quick suspicions is, our DNS got a problem. But after a detailed check in it, we found nothing. So we fired several requests to our hosting (OVH) and registrar (namecheap) to consult what could be the problem.

We also noticed that easycron's whois data on namecheap is "ok" (actually we were badly misdirected by this info, the status on namecheap's whois query page is a "cache", not info in real time). So we didn't think about it's a domain issue.

After several hours of investigation, checking, testing, and chatting with namecheap, one of its colleagues said that he noticed that our domain was in "clientHold" status. I then check again with
http://www.verisign.com/en_US/whois/index.xhtml
and
http://www.enom.com/whois/default.aspx
and found that our domain is really under "Registrar-Hold" (ClientHold) status.

After knowing the root of the problem, we submitted a ticket to namecheap, and they said they have no control to the domain status and need to request enom to update that. After several back and forth, we still could not get the domain reactivated.

Seeing the inefficiency of waiting namecheap acting as intermediate between us and enom, we contacted whois@enom.com directly via email. It's 2015-10-09 17:00 UTC.

whois@enom.com responded with more useful progress than namecheap's ticket system. They (whois@enom.com) replied our emails in 2 hours, 1 hour. And at last, after we provided all needed statement/proof (electricity bill) of our data's accuracy/validity in our last email to them, it took another 3 hours to approve our new whois data and remove "Registrar-Hold" status. That means, if we provide all needed documents in the first email, we could get our domain back to live in 3 hrs. More optimistically, if we send an email with the proof to whois@enom.com directly right after we observed the problem, our domain may be back in 3 hrs, not 30 hrs.

Lessens learned (hope that they could help people to get their domains out of "Registar-Hold or ClientHold" quickly):

• 1) check whois data with the tool on the website of the root registrar (in our case, enom) of your domain, not with the tool caching whois data result (in our case, namecheap).
• 2) contact the root registrar directly (with all possible methods).
• 3) in the first email, prepare all things, like updating detailed whois data, attaching electricity bill, etc.. Provide all information you think that is useful for approving your whois data. It will reduce the email rounds between you and the registrar, which means saving several hrs of time.
• 4) in daily routines, check every email from whois email address immediately, respond and treat them seriously.

  In our case, we received whois update request from enom about 15 days ago, and we updated the data. But we didn't get any email (denial or approval) since that. Until 2015-10-07 20:00, they sent the denial email. This email is with "ticket" in its title. We don't have ticket system in our service, so we put the ticket emails (most of ticket emails reach our email box are generated by users' ticket systems responding to our email alerts) to secondary priority and handle them only at night. Without starting to handle these emails, the domain issue exploded! After 10 hrs of its last email alert, enom held our domain.

• 5) publish the current status or issue fixing progress on twitter/facebook, etc.. This will help people understand what's going on, what to expect. And, you'll get supports from your users. They're more patient than you think and will make allowance for the situation. After experiencing these, you'll be thankful and keen to provide best products and services to all of your users.

In the end of the post, we have to say sorry again to all users of EasyCron. We'll try our best to prevent this kind of problem happen again.

Invoice system launched

In order to help our users easily get an invoice after payment, we developed an invoice system and launched it today.

Anyone can enter their payee information at billing address page and down a PDF invoice from subscriptions page (clicking "View/Down" link of related subscription first, then click "Download" link of specific payment).

Got suggestion for the invoice system? Just send it to us!

Free Trial Plans Added

From now on, all EasyCron premium plans are triable!

We launched 3 Trial plans (Starter Trial, Plus Trial and Max Trial) for Starter, Plus and Max plan. They're totally free. No credit card information or prepayment will be asked before using these plans.

We believe that the Trial plans are the best way for new users to test drive all the cool features which EasyCron has.

Currently all Trial plans last for 7 days. That will be more than enough for anybody to evaluate if EasyCron works for them.

Try our free Trial plans for our cron job service now!

EasyCron moved to https

In order to better protect our users' data, EasyCron switched to HTTPS today.

Using secure connection will be default over our whole site. Any HTTP connection to us will be redirected to HTTPS with 301 permanent redirect. There is one exception though: any requests to our API will be kept intact. The HTTP API requests begin with "http://www.easycron.com/rest/". This execption assures that any requests made by existent applications will still work. New API implementation is encouraged to use our HTTPS endpoint.

After the switch, all data transferred between users' browsers and EasyCron server will be encrypted and immune to sniffing.

If you're our affiliate partner, please update your affiliate link accordingly. Although updating the link is not necessary for us to track your referring, it's better to avoid a redirect :)

Enjoy a more secure EasyCron, and write to us if you want a talk :)

Cron job execution statistics and separate failure logs added

In order to help users inspect the execution status of their cron jobs, we added cron job execution statistics and separate failure logs to EasyCron.

You may see the cron job execution statistics (including the total number of successful executions （TS）, total number of failed executions (TF) and number of consecutive failed executions (CF)) in the cron job list:

Cron job execution statistics

If there is non-zero "total failures" in any of your cron job rows, the background color of the number will turn red. You should check these outstanding rows immediately to resolve the potential problems.

Besides the general Logs and Predictions, we implemented a feature that keeps failure logs separately from the general logs. With this feature, you can analyze the logged failures at any time, and have no need to worry about the "flowing away" of the oldest logs.

For existent cron jobs, we started logging the execution statistics and separate failures from Feb 27 2014 13:19:00 UTC. Please keep in mind this point when evaluating your cron jobs' health.

Below we list how do the user behaviors affect the logs and statistics data.

	Change Settings	Enable Log	Disable Log	Enable Cron Job	Disable Cron Job
General Logs	Clear	Clear	Clear	-	-
Separate Failure Logs	Clear	Clear	Clear	-	-
Total Success Count	Reset	Reset	Reset	-	-
Total Failure Count	Reset	Reset	Reset	-	-
Consecutive Failure Count	Reset	Reset	Reset	Reset	-

In above table, "Clear" means deleting all logs; "Reset" means changing the number to zero; "-" means doing nothing.

"Change Settings" includes any actions that can change cron job settings excepting "Enable Logs", "Disable Logs", "Enable Cron Job" and "Disable Cron Job".

Cron job groups added. Categorization and reordering made possible.

Hi Everyone,

We just added a new "Groups" feature to our system.

From now on, you can create groups, and categorize your cron jobs into different group conveniently. Just simply click on the switcher:

Cron job group view switcher

You will come to a Group View of the cron job list. In the Group View, you can drag cron jobs to categorize or reorder them, and you can also reorder the groups! (check below screenshots)

Drag to categorize/reorder cron jobs

Drag to reorder cron job groups

With the powerful "Groups" feature, you won't get lost in long cron job list again :)

We consider our system's user experience as the most important thing. If you have any advice, let us know.

EasyCron Affiliate Program Launched

Today we proudly launched EasyCron Affiliate Program.

Earn up to $9.99 or more by referring a paid user! Join our Affiliate Program now!

Steps:

• Register as EasyCron user
• On On affiliate page, click on "Add affiliate page" to add an affiliate page (A webpage that you want to place our link on).
• We approve the affiliate page.
• You place our link on your affiliate page.
• Start earning commissions.

Any suggestion, drop us a line.