Get the site status - up or down

The hostname does not contain http://, that is only the scheme for an URI.

Remove it and try this:

<?php
$host = 'google.com';
if($socket =@ fsockopen($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, 30)) {
echo 'online!';
fclose($socket);
} else {
echo 'offline.';
}
?>

What about a curl solution?

function checkOnline($domain) {
   $curlInit = curl_init($domain);
   curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,10);
   curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_HEADER,true);
   curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_NOBODY,true);
   curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);

   //get answer
   $response = curl_exec($curlInit);

   curl_close($curlInit);
   if ($response) return true;
   return false;
}
if(checkOnline('http://google.com')) { echo "yes"; }