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Do you have a website that you would like to know when it is down? Do you have more than one website? Or, are you looking for a thrift solution to monitor your websites? I located many commercial services that offer free versions of website monitoring services, but I wanted something that was simple to use and open source. One such method was developed by Amit Agarwal lagnol.org which uses Google Scripts on your Google Spreadsheets account. It checks a website every five minutes and alerts you when its down via e-mail.

Here are the steps I used to install it to track my websites :

• Sign-in to your Google account using your Gmail or Google Apps login.
• Click here to copy this Google sheet into your Google Drive.

• Type your website URL's in cell B2, separate each URL with a comma if you are entering more than one site (I added "-test" to one domain name to test it out), and your email address in cell B3.
• I did not wish to receive alerts by text message, so I left cell B4 as "No".

• Click on Website Monitor menu in your Google Sheets toolbar.
• Click Initialize and you’ll get a pop-up asking for authorization.
• Grant the necessary access.

• Go to the Website Monitor menu again and choose “Start Website Monitor” to begin the monitoring process.
• Close the Google Sheet.
• You will receive an email when the site is "down" every 5 minutes until it is restored. Each "down" result will be logged in your spreadsheet with the date.

Google notified me of the of following error after a few days of running the script:

My solution was to increase the amount of time between checks to my websites from 5 to 30 minutes. You can access the script by clicking on the link (Copy of Website Monitor v4.0)  in the email you received from Google, or simple clicking on Tools>Script Editor if you have it opened in your Google Drive account:

I opened the script labnol.gs and updated the following code by changing the 5 to 30:

  // Setup trigger that runs every 5 minutes
  
  ScriptApp.newTrigger("websiteMonitor")
  .timeBased()
  .everyMinutes(30) // Updated from 5 to 30 minutes to reduce computer time
  .create();
  
  sheet.toast("Google Docs will now monitor your website(s). "
              + "You can exit this sheet!", "Initialized", -1);
}

This is the maximum number of time for it to run. Then, saved the update and restarted the script.

I'll keep you all posted if any new messages are received.