How would I check if the remote host is up without having a port number? Is there any other way I could check other then using regular ping.
There is a possibility that the remote host might drop ping packets
Many firewalls are configured to drop ping packets without responding. In addition, some network adapters will respond to ICMP ping requests without input from the operating system network stack, which means the operating system might be down, but the host still responds to pings (usually you'll notice if you reboot the server, say, it'll start responding to pings some time before the OS actually comes up and other services start up).
The only way to be certain that a host is up is to actually try to connect to it via some well-known port (e.g. web server port 80).
Why do you need to know if the host is "up", maybe there's a better way to do it.
Check if remote host is up in Python