Website monitoring questions, answered.

BinaryCanary is a hosted website and server monitoring service. It detects failures of your websites, servers, and other internet services and alerts the contacts you choose.

No. BinaryCanary is a completely hosted application, so there is nothing to install. You set it up and use it from any standard web browser.

Plans start at $2 a month and go up to $20 a month, in USD. Every paid plan includes all uptime-monitoring features; plans differ in monitor locations and starting SMS credits. See Pricing for details.

Yes to both. There is a 14-day free trial, and if you cancel your account within 30 days of signup you receive a 100% refund on your fees paid, as set out in our Terms of Service.

You choose the monitoring frequency for each monitor, from every minute up to every 60 minutes, on every plan. Most people check web pages every minute and other monitors, such as email, less often.

It depends on the monitor type. For a web page you can check that the web server responds, or check for specific text that should (or shouldn’t) be on the page. You can also use regular expressions, page size limits, and checksums.

The failure is first verified from a different monitoring node on a separate network. Only once it is confirmed do we start sending alerts according to your escalation profile — which is how BinaryCanary avoids false alarms.

Our monitoring locations include California, Oregon, Virginia, and Ireland. You can monitor from one location or several; each monitoring location uses one monitor credit.

The network is built for full redundancy. If a monitoring node fails, its monitoring tasks are automatically reassigned to a different node within about a minute, so your monitoring should not be affected.

Email servers (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and round-trip email), SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases, FTP, DNS entries, SSL certificate and domain name expiry, ping, routers, and any device on a custom port using the telnet monitor. See Monitoring for the full list.

Each contact can be notified by email, SMS, SMS by email, or phone call (phone alerts are on the Hyper plan). Email and SMS-by-email notifications are free; SMS and phone notifications use one credit each, and additional credits are $0.25 each.

Yes. You can create unlimited escalation profiles to notify people in sequence, let a contact acknowledge an alert to stop further alerts, and set do-not-disturb periods for each contact.

Yes. Group monitors by server and assign maintenance schedules — no alerts are sent during those periods. You can also pause a single monitor, or all monitors on a server, while you work.

Yes. You can have as many user accounts as you need, with an access level for each user, and as many sub-accounts as you want. Agencies use sub-accounts to let clients view their uptime records without letting them make changes.

A graphical dashboard with drill-down into failures and notifications, 12 months of detailed statistics per monitor, and public uptime reports you can display on your website. Network status is also available through our API.