I'd think you'd need to have another machine that periodically checks to see if the server is still up and if not then it notifies you. You can't necessarily rely on something on the same machine checking the web server; the system itself may go down. There are commercial products that do this that will page, call, or send email. For a free, open source one try
http://www.nagios.org/ I haven't tried it so I don't know how well it works. The docs say it's complicated to set up, which is always a good sign.
Or try doing a google search for "open source system monitor" or something like that.