I want the users of my website to check if any other website (http and/or https) is up. There are sites out there that use google analytics for that (if I understood it right). But I don't understand how they do it.
Question 1) How do I use google-analytics on my website to check if some other site is up?
Question 2) How do I do it by myself? Using php or javascript? I wonder if google-analytics might be more reliable in terms if they use multiple server locations to check whether the site is online compared to a single location that I would use with my own code.
You can use server side Curl and monitor http response header, site timeouts.
One can try to connect directly to the http(s) port of the server.
$canConnect = FALSE;
$host = 'www.example.com';
$service_port = 80; // http, for https use 443;
$address = gethostbyname ($host);
$socket = socket_create (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP);
if ($socket !== FALSE) {
$result = socket_connect ($socket, $address, $service_port);
if ($result) {
$canConnect = TRUE;
}
socket_close($socket);
}
You could ping the servers and monitor the responses. This link shows you the implementation in PHP: http://www.darian-brown.com/php-ping-script-to-check-remote-server-or-website/