StalkMySite – FREE Website Uptime Script

I came across this article from Lifehacker about how to use Google Docs and Javascript to monitor if your websites are currently up.  The article links to Amit Agarwal’s post on how to set up his free website uptime script using this Google Doc spreadsheet to handle the ever-so-tedious task of making sure that your sites are up before an upset customer or patron emails you and asks why they can’t read awesome posts like this one about WordPress.

The only issue that I had with Amit’s script is that he only supports one website per spreadsheet.  So to keep track of all of your sites, you might end up making 15 spreadsheets.  Most of the visitors on his blog post were already clamoring for a multisite version and I figured I’d try my hand at making a script that would satisfy these requirements.

Enter StalkMySite.

StalkMySite is my attempt at creating a free website uptime script that tries to satisfy these needs as a web developer.  My script reads all of the URLs that you enter, along with an email address for each site, then loops through all the data, checks each URL to see if it’s up and then if it encounters an error, it logs the error and response code into the spreadsheet, then shoots off an email.  All of this is automated by enabling script triggers that let you choose how often you need updates, from as often as every minute to every week.

Previous versions of StalkMySite didn’t allow for multiple email addresses per URL, but that’s been resolved as of v1.1a (v1.1b is still in the works to allow thresh-holding which many of you have asked for).

How To Setup StalkMySite

It’s pretty easy.  If you haven’t already created a Google Docs account, you can do so here.  If you already have an account, then start by making a copy of the StalkMySite spreadsheet into your own Google Docs repository.  After that, you should be in your own repository, looking at the spreadsheet.

Enter Your Site Details and Recipient Emails into StalkMySite

At this point, you should simply enter your URLs in the URL column on the ‘Enter Information’ worksheet, along with the corresponding email addresses that you want the notifications to be sent to.  To enter multiple recipients for each URL, just separate them by a comma.

Setup Your Triggers to Automate the Script

After entering in this information, click on Tools > Script Editor to enter the Javascript Editor.

From here click Resources > Current project’s triggers…

A new window will pop up where you can enter triggers that will fire at regular intervals and execute certain functions within your Javascript.  The function that you want to execute regularly in the StalkMySite sheet will be the get_user_data function.  Add this as a trigger by clicking on the link “No triggers set up.  Click here to add one now.”  This will allow you to select the get_user_data function.

Next, under the Events section, click on the dropdown and select “Time-driven”.  The next two dropdowns to the immediate right will let you select the interval of time.  Again those range from on the minute to by the week.  Go ahead and choose how often you want it to check your sites.  (NOTE:  I have mine currently set to every 5 minutes.  As this is still in the testing phase, I want to do it more frequently, but may dial my interval back in the future.)

Finally click on the save button here and that’s it!  Well, kind of.  You may receive a pop-up warning about not being the author of this script and the potential security hazard that poses.  This is a standard Google disclaimer to protect the user from doing something stupid.  Don’t worry though, this script is 100% legit and all you have to do is click through the prompt to allow access.

SMS Messages with StalkMySite

In today’s world of mobile technology, everybody is on the go and if you’re one of us “lowlifes” that doesn’t have push notification of email on your phone, you may have to wait an entire 5 (FIVE!!! *gasp*) minutes to get the email message saying your site is down.  Well, perhaps you want it faster than that?  As long as you have a cell phone and understand how sending SMS through email works, then you should be good to go.

I’ve included below a list of some of the most popular carriers and how their email-to-SMS addresses work.  For most of them, you simply put the phone number with no dashes ahead of the “@” symbol with the carriers default email domain afterwards.  Some require the use of the country code and some do not.  Have a look:

* This should go without saying, but replace “1234567890” with your own phone number.

Alltel – 1234567890@message.alltel.com
AT&T – 1234567890@txt.att.net
Boost – 1234567890@myboostmobile.com
Nextel – 1234567890@messaging.nextel.com
Sprint – 1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile – 1234567890@tmomail.net
Verizon – 1234567890@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile – 1234567890@vmobl.com
US Cellular – 1234567890@email.uscc.net

If you know of any other carriers that you’d like to list, post ’em in the comments.

Potential Downside(s)

Personally, I think this script is great.  We no longer have to pay a third party site to ensure that our websites are up and running since this is 100% free.  However, I’m wondering what the Terms of Service of some shared hosting accounts would think about this or even what Google thinks about it.  It’s a simple request with a minimal packet size that is being sent to your server, but what if you’re a hosting company and everybody on their servers had multiple sites that they were doing this to?  Would that go noticed and then subsequently banned from being allowed by hosting providers?

Chances are, probably not (and I really hope not!).  I think that if StalkMySite is used properly it can be a useful preparedness tool that can keep you, the responsible webmaster, on their toes and ready to go.  One thing that I would recommend doing if you run a multisite install like we do here at Frontera, is only set this up on your primary domain.  Since all of the subsites that you run on a WP Multisite Network all point to the same IP address anyway, if your primary goes down, they should all go down.

As an example, say you run 10 sites all on one install of WordPress.  Your primary site has an IP address of 192.168.1.118 (yes I know that’s an internal IP, it’s just for educational purposes…) and you read my article on how to setup multisite domain mapping, so you currently have all 10 of those domains mapped.  If you notice in your hosting providers DNS management console, all of your domains should have an IP address of 192.168.1.118.  Don’t believe me?  Ping each site and see what IP the name translates to.  If it isn’t 192.168.1.118, then I have bad news; your multisite mapping isn’t setup properly.

So why ping 192.168.1.118 10 times every minute to check your sites when you know that if you lose one, you’ll lose them all?  The answer is: don’t.  Just ping your primary and call it a day.

Some Final Things To Note

I wrote this uptime script in an attempt to contribute back to the community and I felt it was a really good learning opportunity for me as far as Javascript is concerned.  I’m always striving to be better at jQuery and Javascript and for some reason, I find it difficult sometimes.  I know my code on this can be improved.  So if you want to improve it or have any tips or pointers for me, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email at mike@fronterahouse.com and I’d be glad to upgrade the script to include them and give you credit for your contributions!