Auto monitoring of websites

Question

Are there any services out there that I can use to automatically monitor my sites and send me an email and/or text message if my sites go down?

Additionally, would it be a good idea to set the cron jobs on my sites to automatically restart the sites on a regular basis? If so, how often should my sites be restarted?

Answer 1

There are literally thousands, Google is your best bet for this solution, you can try https://www.pingdom.com/ also

Coming to the second point of cron job, would be a horrible idea... first you need o figure out why the it went down and correct it, then you should look into something like God (not so Godly ironically) or monit or anything of the sorts that will hearbeat your site and kick it back on if it falls down. You should probably be tracking errors with something like honeybadger or airbrake so you can see this kind of shit coming.

Answer 2

1) New Relic, Datadog, Pingdom, and lots of others have arisen recently. Additionally, you should think about having your own health check responder(s).

2) It often depends on why your sites went down. It also depends on what sort of infrastructure you have for your application. Some server setups can manage this if a single server processor (such as a unicorn worker) goes down or hangs, but if the whole thing goes belly up then you may have something quite a bit more catastrophic.