you can use cURL. You can get cURL to only give you the headers, and not the body, which might make it faster. A bad domain could always take a while because you will be waiting for the request to time-out; you could probably change the timeout length using cURL.
Here is example:
function remoteFileExists($url) {
$curl = curl_init($url);
//don't fetch the actual page, you only want to check the connection is ok
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
//do request
$result = curl_exec($curl);
$ret = false;
//if request did not fail
if ($result !== false) {
//if request was ok, check response code
$statusCode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
if ($statusCode == 200) {
$ret = true;
}
}
curl_close($curl);
return $ret;
}
$exists = remoteFileExists('http://stackoverflow.com/favicon.ico');
if ($exists) {
echo 'file exists';
} else {
echo 'file does not exist';
}