website moitoring
 

Im currently working on a system to monitor a website and notify via SMS if there are any problems.

I know that there are already services like that out there, does anyone use them? and if so, do they work to your own settings or just to a basic set of rules? Im looking to incorporate some checks to highlight hacking attempts or unauthorised changes to files etc.

This is the point where you come in and burst my bubble by telling me x.com do that for $1 per year with a free blow job thrown in. If not then Id be interested in any thoughts people have as to what could be tested to highlight these things. Checking site is working is straight forward, hacking attempts a little more complicated.

Id be interested in any thoughts people have on anything else that could be checked, are there things within cam or streaming sites which could be monitored?

I've used NewRelic in the past and found it useful. The most useful features were bandwidth monitoring, average response times, and checking for sudden increases in errors.

Something that would be nice as well is to know whether or not an owner's site is down vs an external 3rd party service that is required to render a response.

That part is straight forward, thats the bit Ive got working at the moment on mine. It currently checks every 5minutes and if it gets anything other than a working page then it carries out a handful of other checks (including 3 further checks of index page at 30 second intervals) before deciding if I need to be notified which it does via SMS. Ive obviously got this running on a different server to the site and a further copy on a totally seperate host which checks if the checker is working and if not, then reverts to that checking the site!

I was thinking of offering that service out at around £5 ($7-$8?) per month.

Those prices sound very reasonable. Are you familiar with https://victorops.com/ and the like? Those are probably your competitors.