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