Bash: check if site is up or down

I have a few self hosted sites and I have been looking for a way to monitor the site statuses in a way that I will get an email when a site is down and another one once that site is back up again. So I decided to write a little bash script that can run on my home linux server. Here is the code:

#!/bin/bash

################################################################################

# This script will check to see if a website is up/down by pinging the url
# If there is no response an email wil be send via an external smtp mail server
# If the site status is down an email will be send when the site is up again

# set your check interval here :-) #############################################
interval=3600 # hour

# begin status ; DO NOT CHANGE #################################################
stat=0 # this is the status UP; status 1 is DOWN

# your url #####################################################################
url="localhost"

# email settings ###############################################################

send(){ # subject message
	toemail="you@gmail.com"
	fromemail="you@gmail.com"
	smtpserver="smtp.gmail.com"
	port=587
	username="you@gmail.com"
	passw="YourVerySecretPassword"
	sendemail -f "$fromemail" -t "$toemail" -u "$1" -m "$2" -s \
	"$smtpserver:$port" -xu "$username" -xp "$passw" -o tls=yes -q
}

# check url ####################################################################

while :
do
	wget --server-response --spider $url # checking the actual response is
        # better, because server me be running and returning pings while our
        # site could be down. This wget will only return exit 0 if response is
        # 200 ok
        #ping -c 1 $url | grep "0%" > /dev/null
	# if we get zero percent lost in the ping, all is well and we should get
	# exit status 0 on this last program run / exited
	if [ "$?" -eq 0 ] # so if we have exit status of zero then server is UP
	then
		# only if the current status is DOWN (1) then we want to notify
		# the new status up and change the stat variable accordingly
		if [ "$stat" -eq 1 ]
		then
		echo "UP | `date`" >> "$url-status.log"
		send "$url is UP" "UP | `date`"
		stat=0
		fi
	else
		# same as above but the other way around
		if [ "$stat" -eq 0 ]
		then
		echo "DOWN | `date`" >> `echo "$url-status.log"`
      		send "$url is DOWN" "DOWN | `date`"
		stat=1
		fi
	fi

	sleep $interval

done

exit

# Ciao #########################################################################

This bash script can also run on Mac or Windows. Bash comes standard on Mac OSX. On windows you will need to install Bash and other GNU tools. I might do a post on how to set this up later. The sendEmail program used in the script did not come standard on my linux box, but it was easily installed with one command line:

sudo apt-get install sendemail

The sendEmail website can be found here.