HostEntrepreneur

Binary Canary’s, http://www.binarycanary.com, slogan in “We alert you first”. For the past several months we’ve been trying them out, and honestly… they DO! We run redundant Nagios systems – one in each datacenter monitoring pretty much everything. But often Binary Canary will be the first to let us know if something happens.

The service has been excellent. We had tried out Just Uptime, and had an account with Hyperspin for a long time. Just Uptime’s service had false positive as well as negatives, and had several outages that we never heard a word about except through hosting forums. Hyperspin performance is excellent but comes at a price. Service wise, Hyperspin and Binary Canary seemed about equal. There are differences in reports, but as far as notification goes both seem to be of very high reliability.

So it comes down to price… Hyperspin for 10 monitors at 1 minute intervals is $120 per month ($86 and change if you’re a reseller). Binary Canary on the other hand is $5! No I didn’t leave off a zero. It’s $5 for 10 1 minute monitors! And if you upgrade to the Power Plan you get for 30 monitors, letting you  monitor the same 10 sites from EACH of their 3 facilities (Seattle, DC and London) for $10 a month. That’s a bargain! … Now if they’d make it where I could get multiple uptime badges on a single page for a server status page (something happens with the javascript I think where it shows the same badge repeatedly – but didn’t really dig to see what’s happening), that would be icing on the cake.

Disclosure: We have NOT been compensated by binarycanary.com in any way for this review, nor do we expect to be. We have found a service we feel to be reliable while providing quite a bit of value at an extremely reasonable price, and we thought we’d share that with you. (We’re like that.)

Quick Update: Binary Canary’s developer did some work yesterday, and now in FireFox the uptime badges work like you would expect. IE 7 and 8 have issues (but then when don’t they???)  You have to give them credit… within hours of hearing about my wanting multiple badges on a single page they started addressing the issue.  I suspect they’ll get the IE goofyness ironed out too. If you want to see multiple badges on a page you can go to our server status page at http://www.LagniappeInternet.com/servers.php

This handy little device is a Remotely Controlled Power Distribution Unit or PDU. Think of it as a smart power strip…  It has an ethernet connection and gets its own IP address. It has a total of 10 outlets, 8 of which are remotely controllable.  Once networking is established, you can remotely log in to an embedded web server and turn power outlets on and off without having to be there physically.

But it gets better!  The software built into the unit can also monitor ip addresses via ping and automatically cycle the power if the server stops responding. For safety sake, you can set how many times it needs to not respond before cycling. This means your downtime for a hung server goes from 10 to 15 minutes IF someone is at the datacenter, or possibly worse if someone isn’t or is busy with other issues… to a couple of minutes while the server reboots. This can definitely help your uptime SLA.

The only thing I wish this had that it doesn’t is the ability to have multiple logins and be able to limit those logins to controlling individual ports. That would come in handy for companies that colocate servers for others, or offer dedicated servers to their customers. It would let them offer the customer the ability to reboot their box (and only their box). When I asked about it, I was told it may be added in a future firmware upgrade. But I just checked the company’s website and the latest firmware doesn’t address this yet. This isn’t a major issue for us but I could see it being one for some, and it’s a nice selling point if they added it.

We’ve bought ours from http://www.datacenterhardware.com/ and wholeheartedly recommend them – tell Benjamin that Lagniappe Internet sent you if you do order from them (we get no commission or anything like that but a little good will never hurts).

Today I’m pointing you towards something a little lighter than yesterday’s Part 1 of writing a business plan … One of the feature of today’s subject,  http://www.webhostingshow.com is a podcast by and about webhosting by Mitch Keeler – the self proclaimed “rock star of web hosting industry.”   This 15 minute-ish podcast is worth a listen…  With upwards of a half dozen topics per show, there’s always something you’ll find useful.  It’s worth an hour out of your life each month… listen and learn something.

No, not the “water displacement” spray lubricant we’re all used to!   But this product, the “Turbo Air Rechargable Air Duster”  from the same people.  Available from buy.com (and I’m sure many other places) for about the cost of 2 cans of compressed air, it’s great in that you never run out (it’s basically an nice little fan with good bit of torque) provided you keep it charged up.  I’ve been playing with one for a week or so now and don’t plan on going back to the old throw aways cans ever again.  Now that’s got to be “greener” than all those empty cans in the landfill.

 Link to buy.com item: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=211190111  but check around you might even find it cheaper.