How to exit from a command after n seconds?

I'm writing a script and would like to know how to ask one of the commands to exit after few seconds. For eg. let's suppose my script runs 2 application commands in it.

#!/bin/bash

for i in `cat servers`
do
<command 1> $i >> Output_file  #Consistency command
<command 2> $i >> Output_file  #Communication check
done

These commands are to check consistency & communication to/from application. I want to know how do I make sure that command 1 & 2 runs for only few seconds and if there is no response from particular host, move on to next command.