How do you monitor the availability of multiple websites

Question

I need to ensure that any number of websites and services haven\'t bitten the dust. At the moment I rely on a simple 5 minute cronjob which uses curl and a file of urls to c

Answer 1

Speaking from experience, I'd double the suggestion of using Nagios. I don't think I have found a better open source tool than Nagios that achieves the same stuff.