Reliable notification system for site errors?

I have a hobby wesbite written in PHP and I like to know if there is a problem with it (database errors, an update broke something, etc.) I have a simple notification system which sends me an email if there is a problem and that would be enough for me. Unfortunately, the mail sending feature of the hosting provider is not very reliable. Usually it works, but there are periods when it simply swallows the mails and doesn't send anything.

Is there some other reliable method for notification of the maintainer in case of an error? It's a hobby site, so I'm looking for something simple. Not an industrial strength solution, but something more reliable than email. How do you monitor your hobby sites?

I tagged the question with PHP, because the site is written in it, but I'm also interested in generic suggestions, not just in concrete PHP solutions.

开发者_JS百科EDIT: the question is about the mechanism of active notification. I want to be notified when something happens. If PHP email is not reliable then what are the other possibilites of notification?

EDIT2: two examples to illustrate what kind of solutions I'm thinking of:

• Store the errors and provide a page listing the latest errors (maybe password protected) which would be polled from my computer which could pop up some window if there is an error. It can work, but it works only if I'm at my home computer.
• Use google calendar api to insert an event into it when an error occurs, and google calendar will send me an email reliably. It may work, though it's cumbersome.
• some other idea?

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Are you looking only for email based alerting systems? If not, you should try Notifo. You can use their API to push notifications and it'll be instantly sent to your phone.

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PHP has an error_log function for returning errors in various ways, either via email to an admin, to the servers log file or to an external file. I assume that you could merely substitute this functionality for your mailto when you find an error:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.error-log.php

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I've run into the issues you've mentioned with my hobby project as well. When I started I was using GoDaddy who's mail relay was pretty unreliable for delivering mail in a timely fashion.

Two things I'd suggest:

• For sending email messages with higher reliablity, check out Postmark. Its a paid solution, but the rates are pretty reasonable and it comes with PHP classes you can hook your code up to fairly easily.

• For custom error handling, check out PHP's set_error_handler(). Its a good way to have custom code execute on error conditions on your site. From the documentation:

  set_error_handler — Sets a user-defined error handler function.
  
  This function can be used for defining your own way of handling errors during runtime, for example in applications in which you need to do cleanup of data/files when a critical error happens, or when you need to trigger an error under certain conditions (using trigger_error()).

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Maybe give Airbrake (formerly Hoptoad) a try. This is a commercial service, but they have a basic free plan (tiny little link at the bottom of the pricing page), and the tool looks pretty cool. It's focused on Ruby on Rails but according to their site has plugins for various other frameworks and languages, inlcuding PHP.

http://airbrakeapp.com/pages/home

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We have a system set-up that polls specific pages on our important websites every now and then and checks for certain strings. Would something like that be viable to you?