What is the "in" thing at the moment for SMS alerts for pinging servers these days?
Something similar to hyperspin..?
Thanks.
( i use nagios already for internal servers but want something external )

You mentioned hyperspin, why not use them? They're one of the best out there.

I was wondering what other alternatives people were using

I personally use hyperspin. Some known services that I haven't used include pingdom and host-tracker. An alternative would be to run your own script on a separate server, and interact with an SMS gateway such as clickatell to send you SMS whenever a service/server is down.

another way is to get a hosting account and run your monitoring script that emails you to you_number@your_carrier.com (example: tmobile phone_number@tmail.com... most carriers have this) the email will come as an SMS to your phone. You can monitor as many IPs as you want do not have to spend big bucks and pay per SMS and per IP monitored... get a $3-$4/month hosting account ;)

We use hyperspin ourselves

Have a look at http://www.pingdom.com/

Hi,
does any one system can let user to customer their own SMS messages?
thanks

I'm very satisfied with pingdom.com

Pingdom works very well for us as well including SMS alerts.

I would also recommend Pingdom. It works well for us also.
All the best,

another way is to get a hosting account and run your monitoring script that emails you to you_number@your_carrier.com (example: tmobile phone_number@tmail.com... most carriers have this) the email will come as an SMS to your phone. You can monitor as many IPs as you want do not have to spend big bucks and pay per SMS and per IP monitored... get a $3-$4/month hosting account ;)
There is only one catch to this.
Since email to sms gateways do not generate revenue on the send side, it is the lowest priority with carriers. When the going gets tough, these are the first to be dropped. In addition, if too many messages come from one source in a single day, they will be dropped even if the gateway is not that busy.
The carriers that I have seen do this the most are Vodafone and Verizon.
Just dealt with a problem with a user who configured his alerts to go through the Verizon email-sms gateway this morning. I found the actual email leaving the server in the logs, and a 250 OK smtp message accepted status returned by the Verizon gateway server. The user never got either of the two messages. The first was his activation pin, and the second was a test message. Both accepted as OK by Verizon, neither was delivered.
All that can be done is for the user to pony up for real SMS alerts because it is impossible to tell in advance when the email gateway will drop messages. It is a good backup, but cannot be counted on as the primary channel.

pingdom is good and cheaper then HS.

Pingdom works very well for us as well including SMS alerts.
Pingdom is working very well for us too. SMS alerts get sent to our tech's regarding problems after 3 minutes of downtime, and this allows us to restore service back as quickly as possible, since the first step in restoring service is knowing that it is down :)

You cannot go wrong with Pingdom. Definitely you'll have a great
experience at your end.