How to get a phone notification if my VPS goes offline?
What are my options for getting alerts on my android phone if services on my VPS becoming unresponsive? My first thought is a simple app that periodically pings domains and gives a notification if any fail. Is there an open source app for that? Or something else?
Uptime Kuma has a number of notification options.
I just had to set one up because the Oracle free tier is hot garbage and needs resetting every day or two.
No idea. The dashboard says it’s running and fine, sometimes the shell console is ok, sometimes it’s also bogged down, but the instance is completely non-responsive from outside. The other instance I have in the same tenancy but a different fault domain is perfectly fine, so I don’t know if that’s related somehow. I’m running Pangolin on it to forward a couple things, one of them is higher throughput than I had expected, but rebooting makes it come back, so I don’t think they’re throttling me.
I’m kind of at a loss, but I threw together a webhook to use their API to reboot it when it stops responding and that seems to be working while not actually addressing whatever the root cause is.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)[Thread #191 for this comm, first seen 24th Mar 2026, 21:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
There’s a lot of options. There’s countless paid services that offer exactly that.
If you wanna build something yourself for free, you could probably set up a site accessible via HTTP on your server and create a script on your phone that pings it every 30 seconds or so. Afaik, termux has a termux-notify function that lets you send a notification.
Pseudocodelike, it would look somewhere like this I think:
Da Oeuf
Midnight Wolf
thirdBreakfast
Appoxo
WIPocket#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Config
NOTIFY_TITLE="Server Alert"
NOTIFY_MESSAGE="Server returned a non‑200 status."
HOST="funnysite.com"
PORT=8080
PATH="/healtcheck"
URL="http://${HOST}:${PORT}${PATH}"
# Config
HTTP_CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")
if [[ "$HTTP_CODE" != "200" ]]; then
termux-notify -t "$NOTIFY_TITLE" -c "$NOTIFY_MESSAGE $HOST:$PORT → $HTTP_CODE"
fi
exit 0
Afaik, termux doesn’t ship the cron daemon, but you can install cronie or use an external task scheduler. There, just set to run the script every 60 seconds or so. Whatever you need.
I haven’t tested anything of this, but in my head, it sounds like it should work fine.
Set up Uptime Kuma on the VPS to monitor services there. Uptime Kuma can send you a notification if any of them become unresponsive.
Then use Healthchecks.io to monitor the VPS itself and Uptime Kuma.
You can set up to 20 monitors on the free tier with healthchecks.io.
Its a push monitor, so if the VPS/Uptime Kuma doesnt reach out to say its alive within the designated time interval you’ll get a notification, like a sort of dead man switch.
Theres a load of notification options for both healthchecks and Uptime Kuma including email, discord, ntfy, etc, etc.
This way you have no need for a seperate self hosted server, and you get healthchecks on yo healthchecks.
ikidd
Strit