Add https://www.google.com to a record. Run cronjobs/checkurl.pl, verify google returns not 200. For example when I ran it, I got the following result. https://www.google.com 500 Can't connect to www.google.com:443 The script needs to be able to use cookies, a possible library to use: http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/HTTP-Cookies-6.01/lib/HTTP/Cookies.pm Many sites require the use of cookies or they do not report back correct statuses.