programmatic automated way to determine: is my site reachable?

Question

Question: I need a way to automate routine tests that tell me if my website is reachable from remote addresses. Local tests and scripts from my own machines are not enough because these tests are inconclusive (return false positives).

Is there a service or programming trick I can use to routinely attempt to connect to my site where the connections are always external to my local subnet?

Answer 1

You can use cURL with an external proxy.

Answer 2

You could sign up with a proxy service and then make http requests to that URL. That way, the data is first retrieved from their host, which would be external to you.