This is an easy way to set up a monitoring system that calls your phone number if any of your websites go down. It uses Uptime Robot for continual monitoring and Twilio for voice calls. You can set it up to call multiple phone numbers as well.
It's almost free! You will have to pay for each voice call at the Twilio voice rate ($0.02 per call per callee in the USA).
It should be easy to set up as a cronjob on a server that runs Python and talks to the Internet. Obviously, you should use a hosting platform that isn't also used for your sites. If you want something that can run on AppEngine or Heroku, see the original project.
This script uses the Echo Twimlet from Twilio Labs to provide a TwiML endpoint for the Twilio API to use. This allows Everyone Panic to run as a standalone script instead of a web app.
It's the closest thing we've had to a "set it and forget it" service, since we don't need to touch it in order to add additional sites in Uptime Robot. This app has been dutifully watchful for us ever since we whipped it up one day, and since our automated monitoring has grown a lot more since then, we figured that it was time to release it into the wild.
You need to set a few different environment variables:
TWILIO_SID- find this in your Twilio accountTWILIO_TOKEN- also find this in your Twilio accountTWILIO_FROM- a Twilio purchased or validated phone numberCALLEES- a comma separated list of phone numbers:+15551111111,+15552222222UPTIME_ROBOT_KEY- your Uptime Robot account's API key
git clonecd everyonepanicmkvirtualenv everyonepanic -r requirements.txt- ...
...