Often times I came across the thought of doing this but have never gotten to a point of necessity until today. When the all mysterious crashes of one router at work forced my hand. This is after I have solved the issue with the WEP crashes, which was frequent while the aftermath of that is acceptably less annoying.
Thanks to suggestion from a forum, I now use Host-Tracker. A free service providing periodic status monitoring with email notification on server down (or up). So far so good. I don't know how effective the email notification upon the checks since I have just set up and I don't feel like purposely shutdown the school's servers just for test. I will wait patiently.
Since I suddenly learned of the 30 day trial of Host-Tracker, and don't know how to downgrade to the basic 2-url free plan, I have signed up with another free 3-url host with 30 min interval minimum: http://www.montastic.com