OK, I got it... I ended up using fsockopen as I found another snippet that help tremendously:
<?php
$domain = "ssl://$ip";
$portno = 443;
$method = "HEAD";
$url = "/";
$http_response = "";
$http_request .= $method." ".$url ." HTTP/1.0\r\n";
$http_request .= "\r\n";
$fp = fsockopen($domain, $portno, $errno, $errstr);
if($fp){
fputs($fp, $http_request);
$http_response .= fgets($fp, 128)."\n";
fclose($fp);
}
print $http_response;
?>
Sites that have 443 assigned and an SSL installed return:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...where as sites that don't, return nothing; at least in this configuration,