Is "HEAD" as request-method enough to check if site is reachable

Question

We want to check if a site exists/is available by using the following piece of code:

var request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "HEAD";

As we don't want to download the whole site I thought it might be enough to just get the headers and evaluate them.

Am I missing there some thoughts or is it really enough to check if the website is up and reachable?

Answer 1

Yes, HEAD is probably the best option.

As mentioned in RFC 2616 :

This method is often used for testing hypertext links for validity, accessibility, and recent modification.