This is what I think my application will use to perform heathcheck for http server

heath_check.py

def heart_check(target):
	global last_check  
	if int(time() - last_check) > 5:
		logger(ctime() +  ": Perform heart check") 
		p    = re.compile("[a-z0-9-.]*?\.[a-z0-9]+$")
		domain_tld = p.findall(target)[0]   
		conn = HTTPConnection(domain_tld, timeout = 5) 
		try:
			accepted_responses = (404, 302, 304, 301, 200) 
			conn.request('HEAD', '/') 
			response = conn.getresponse() 
			if response.status in accepted_responses: return 1
			else:
				logger(target + ' is down') 
				return 0
		except Exception, e:
			logger(target + ' ' + str(e) ) 
			return 0 
		finally:
			conn.close() 
			last_check += 5 
	else: 
		return 2