My site went down for a few hours yesterday and my users knew before me

It happened to me.

My site — bashsnippets.xyz — had been down for six hours before I knew
about it. I found out because a reader emailed me. Not because I checked.
Not because I had monitoring. Because someone else had to tell me.

That's the kind of thing that sits with you.

The fix took 20 minutes to build. Here's exactly what I wrote and why
every piece of it matters.

The problem with checking manually

The natural instinct is to just open a browser and load the page.
But that has two failure modes:

1. You only check when you remember to
2. You don't check at 2am when it actually goes down

What you want is automated, logged, and running while you sleep.

Start with the one-liner

Before building the full script, understand the core command:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://yoursite.com

Run it. It prints one number. That number is your site's HTTP status code.

Here's what each flag does — and this is worth understanding
because you'll use these flags for a lot more than uptime checking:

-o /dev/null — tells curl to discard the response body entirely.
You don't need the HTML. You only need the status code.
Without this flag, curl dumps the entire page to your terminal.

-s — silent mode. Suppresses the progress bar and error messages.
Without this, curl prints download stats you don't need.

-w "%{http_code}" — write-out format. Tells curl to print only
the HTTP status code after the request completes.
This is the only output you care about.

Result: just the number. Nothing else. Clean, parseable, scriptable.

$ curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://bashsnippets.xyz
200

Status codes you need to know

The full script

Now wrap it in logic that tells you what the number means:

#!/bin/bash

CHECK="✓"
CROSS="✗"

URL="https://bashsnippets.xyz"
STATUS=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")

if [ "$STATUS" -eq 200 ]; then
  echo "$CHECK $URL is up (HTTP $STATUS)"
else
  echo "$CROSS $URL returned HTTP $STATUS — check it"
fi

The $CHECK and $CROSS variables aren't required — you could hardcode
the symbols directly — but defining them at the top makes it trivial
to change the output format later and keeps the echo lines readable
at a glance.

Save this as uptime.sh in your home directory.

Make it executable

chmod +x ~/uptime.sh

chmod +x adds execute permission to the file. Without this,
bash treats it as a plain text file and refuses to run it.
This is the step people forget. Every time.

Test it manually before scheduling anything:

./uptime.sh
# ✓ https://bashsnippets.xyz is up (HTTP 200)

Schedule it with cron

A script you run manually is still manual monitoring.
The goal is automation — the script checks your site while you sleep.

Open your crontab:

crontab -e

Add this line:

*/5 * * * * ~/uptime.sh >> ~/uptime.log 2>&1

Breaking this down:

*/5 * * * * — run every 5 minutes. The */5 means "every 5th
minute of every hour of every day." Change to */1 to test it faster.

~/uptime.sh — the script to run. The ~/ expands to your
home directory — safer than a relative path.

>> ~/uptime.log — append output to a log file.
Using >> instead of > means each result adds to the file
rather than overwriting it. You want a history, not just the last result.

2>&1 — redirect stderr to stdout so errors also get logged.

Save and exit. Cron confirms: crontab: installing new crontab

Watch it run in real time

tail -f ~/uptime.log

tail -f watches a file and prints new lines as they're added.
Open this in a second terminal after setting up cron.
Within a minute you'll see the script run on its own —
no input from you, no trigger, just cron firing the script
and the result appearing in the log automatically.

That moment where the second line appears on its own —
that's the confirmation that automation is actually working.

The full copy-paste version

#!/bin/bash

CHECK="✓"
CROSS="✗"

URL="https://yoursite.com"   # ← change this to your site
STATUS=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")

if [ "$STATUS" -eq 200 ]; then
  echo "$CHECK $URL is up (HTTP $STATUS)"
else
  echo "$CROSS $URL returned HTTP $STATUS — check it"
fi

Cron line to add with crontab -e:

*/5 * * * * ~/uptime.sh >> ~/uptime.log 2>&1

Full reference page with all variations:
→ bashsnippets.xyz/snippets/check-if-website-is-up.html

I post a new copy-paste bash script every week at bashsnippets.xyz.
All free. No signups. @BashSnippets on YouTube if you want to see these in 30-second form.

How do you monitor your sites? I'm genuinely curious what the rest of you are running 👇