This little PHP snippet will allow you to check if a remote web server is online and include a file from the remote server. Because PHP's include command does not seem to work with remote servers we have used the readfile command to replace it.

<?php
if(fsockopen("remoteserver.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 2)){
 @readfile("http://remoteserver.com/path/filename.ext");
 } else {
 // do something else if server is not available...
}
?>