I have a hobby wesbite written in PHP and I like to know if there is a problem with it (database errors, an update broke something, etc.) I have a simple notification system which sends me an email if there is a problem and that would be enough for me. Unfortunately, the mail sending feature of the hosting provider is not very reliable. Usually it works, but there are periods when it simply swallows the mails and doesn’t send anything.
Is there some other reliable method for notification of the maintainer in case of an error? It’s a hobby site, so I’m looking for something simple. Not an industrial strength solution, but something more reliable than email. How do you monitor your hobby sites?
I tagged the question with PHP, because the site is written in it, but I’m also interested in generic suggestions, not just in concrete PHP solutions.
EDIT: the question is about the mechanism of active notification. I want to be notified when something happens. If PHP email is not reliable then what are the other possibilites of notification?
EDIT2: two examples to illustrate what kind of solutions I’m thinking of:
- Store the errors and provide a page listing the latest errors (maybe password protected) which would be polled from my computer which could pop up some window if there is an error. It can work, but it works only if I’m at my home computer.
- Use google calendar api to insert an event into it when an error occurs, and google calendar will send me an email reliably. It may work, though it’s cumbersome.
- some other idea?
Are you looking only for email based alerting systems? If not, you should try Notifo. You can use their API to push notifications and it’ll be instantly sent to your phone.