Web site monitors and PowerPoint timers
If you've been monitoring your online sites using a third-party service you'll be more than slightly aware how expensive this can be. While there might have been some rationale to these high prices in the early days of Web monitoring, with the plummeting costs for hosting and bandwidth, today you'd expect these services to be cheap, er, more cost-effective.
I recently found a new service called BinaryCanary (a clever but really geeky name) that monitors any of 12 protocols (including HTTP, FTP, DNS and IMAP) and is reasonably priced.
BinaryCanary monitors your sites from three locations (Seattle, Washington, D.C. and London) and crosschecks between locations before raising an alert to prevent false positives. BinaryCanary can also check for domain name expiration and can monitor for unauthorized page changes (in case hackers deface your content).
