There are lots of recipes for using UpTimeRobot.com to send you an SMS when your server is down (and it will notify you if it comes back up as well).<p><a href="https://ifttt.com/p/saluki" rel="nofollow">https://ifttt.com/p/saluki</a><p>You get 100 FREE SMS alerts from IFTTT.com each month.<p>If you run up against the 100 SMS limit you can set it up for iMessage instead of SMS.
Another great way to get notifications on your phone is to use your carrier's email-to-SMS gateway. For example, on T-mobile it is 6105551212@tmomail.net.<p>If you don't want to set up nagios, you can create a quick monitoring solution with cron along these lines:<p><pre><code> */10 * * * * nobody curl -sSfm 10 http://www.example.com || mail -s 'www.example.com is DOWN' 6105551212@tmomail.net < /dev/null
</code></pre>
This assumes you have working email delivery on the machine doing the checking.
pagerduty [0] does this and more. You also don't need to host your own infra for the alert system.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.pagerduty.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pagerduty.com/</a>
It's a nice hack, but it's better to use external service for this. We run <a href="https://t1mr.com" rel="nofollow">https://t1mr.com</a><p>One problem is you need separate infrastructure to host your monitor. You also need to monitor the monitoring service, or it is easy for it to be quietly failing until your real site fails without warning. We run a separate instance that only monitors the public instance of t1mr.<p>Attention to detail matters and you really want to be focusing on your product. We are quietly handling other stuff, like calling multiple people until someone really answers the phone, or checking if your ssl certificates are about to expire.
Why reinvent the wheel?<p>If all you need is monitoring a single end-point, then just signup to a Pingdom free account. Very reliable monitoring and 20 SMS notifications per month (no caps on email notifications) <a href="https://www.pingdom.com/free/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pingdom.com/free/</a><p>And if you need to monitor more than one system, then go for Pingdom "Starter" for only £6.99/month <a href="https://www.pingdom.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pingdom.com/pricing/</a><p>IMO that's fairly cheap and avoid yet another system to maintain..