A shell script example of how to check if your servers are up (the quick 'n dirty way.) Provided an example of how to check both an HTTP server, and an FTP server.Use `crontab` to automate this scripts execution.

checkServers.sh

#!/bin/bash


# Setup a cron job to check on your servers every 5 minutes. #
#                                                            #
#   crontab -e                                               #
#   */5 * * * * /path/to/checkServers.sh                     #
#                                                            #


# HTTP
ping -c1 -W1 kylematheny.com || notify-send 'kylematheny.com IS DOWN!!'
curl -k --silent https://somedomain:8080 > /dev/null || notify-send "somedomain Application IS DOWN!!"


# FTP
wget --spider --timeout=3 --tries=2 ftp://someftpserver.com > /dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? -ne 6 ]]
	then
	notify-send 'FTP Server is offline'
fi