I just needed to see if a remote web server was alive, so it didn't really matter to me whether I used ping or a curl command like this. Here's a modified version of the original source code: =200 && $httpcode<300){ echo 'worked'; } else { echo "didn't work"; } ?> You can find the original source code at this "Lost in Code" URL. Issue a ping command from a PHP script As a final option, if you can run the ping command from your command line, you can also just execute it with a PHP ping script, like this: In my case this didn't work because I wasn't given access to the ping command, but if you do have access to the ping command at the command line, this "PHP exec" example shows how this can work. REF: https://alvinalexander.com/php/php-ping-scripts-examples-ping-command/ {{tag>php ping}}