[OT] Any way to see if a website is up in an automated way?

[Rhino]

I am looking for a tool or technique that can automatically check to see if
a specific website is up - say twice a day - and then send me an email if it
isn't. I do not want to have to manually check myself.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

I have no money to spend on this so if there is no free service that does
it, I'd be interested in how I can program this, preferably in Java. I
assume that my best bet would be Java application that I could schedule via
Windows XP scheduler but I can code applets and servlets too if that makes
more sense.

 

[Richard Wheeldon]

I am looking for a tool or technique that can automatically check to see if
a specific website is up - say twice a day - and then send me an email if it
isn't. I do not want to have to manually check myself.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

If you're running on Unix, this kind of thing is probably best done in a
cron job with a shell script:

#!/bin/sh
wget -O - http://www.google.com/ > /dev/null 2>&1 ||
mail -s "Wot no website" (e-mail address removed) << EOF
Where's my website gone?
EOF

If you really want to do it in Java, simply create an HTTP connection to
port 80, check the return codes and read in the data for comparison to a
known good page,

Regards,

Richard

 

[Zaph0d]

If you're not using unix based OS, just create an HTTPClient (
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/ ) and check the error
codes. You can either leave the program running and use a timer, or use
your OS schedular to fire the the program at regular intervals.

 

[David Segall]

I am looking for a tool or technique that can automatically check to see if
a specific website is up - say twice a day - and then send me an email if it
isn't. I do not want to have to manually check myself.

Montastic <http://www.montastic.com/> is free and checks about every
ten minutes.

I use ZoneEdit <http://www.zoneedit.com/> because it not only checks
every ten minutes it switches my domain to a backup server if the
prime server is down. It costs ten dollars per year.

 

[Rhino]

Montastic <http://www.montastic.com/> is free and checks about every
ten minutes.

Thanks for that suggestion! I knew ethere be'd something that would do this
and this looks fine! I'm giving it a test as I type this.

There is no way to change the frequency of the tests or control the text of
the email or send copies of the email to someone else, right? I can't see
any controls at all at the Montastic site aside from selecting the URL that
is being monitored....

I use ZoneEdit <http://www.zoneedit.com/> because it not only checks
every ten minutes it switches my domain to a backup server if the
prime server is down. It costs ten dollars per year.

I'm already using ZoneEdit. But for some reason, even though my IP address
is correct, my site is going down occasionally. It is sometimes days later
before someone points it out to me. (It's just a club website, not a
business, so traffic is pretty low.) To fix the problem, I need to go into
ZoneEdit and set the IP to an INCORRECT value, wait ten minutes, then set it
back to the correct value; then my site works again. I'm really not sure why
this is happening or what to do about it but being notified that this site
is down is a way that I can at least get the site back up again quickly.

 

[Alex Hunsley]

If you're not using unix based OS, just create an HTTPClient (
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/ ) and check the error
codes. You can either leave the program running and use a timer, or use
your OS schedular to fire the the program at regular intervals.

Or consider HTTPUnit:
http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/