Monitoring your website is very easy using mypackets. The easiest way is to ping your website. When you send a ping to your website there is an echo sent through the internet to your web server. The server responds by replying and sending a response back to the computer that sent the response.

Some ISP's block the ping utility. Ping can be use by bad people to quickly scan networks to find targets to focus an attack on. There are many other reasons why ping is blocked but for the sake of this article we will skip over the others.

When ping is blocked the next best choice is to monitor the TCP port. Most websites deliver web content on port 80. To monitor a website on port 80 mypackets will telnet to your web server and simulate a browser connecting on the standard TCP port 80. This is a very effective way to mimic the action of a web user and verify that your website is working properly.

To take things one step further mypackets scans the response of the telnet session to make sure that the web server delivers a “200 code”. A 200 code means that the web server found the web page on it’s hard drive and sent it to the client browser without error. Let’s say that your website has a database. If the database server is down, your website is down. To make you aware of this problem mypackets looks for a code sent back in the header called a “500 code” There are many types of 500 codes but if one is present then mypackets marks the device as “down” and sends you a text message.