What is your "insurance" for hosting? I'm not aware of any SLAs that actually pay out anything near equal value to an outage they caused. If you're paying a hosting provider $500/mo for a sever that you generate an average of $1000/hr in web sales from and they have a 3 hour outage, you'll get an SLA credit for a couple of bucks applied to your next months service.
The Internet is filled with news about hosting provider provided backups being unusable for a number of reasons at inopportune times.
You should have a backup copy of your code/databases in your control, on a machine that is completely independent from whatever you are doing your production hosting on. You should have done a "warm metal" install and test of that code another server to be sure that you can recover operations in a reasonable amount of time (whatever is appropriate for your case).
For your scale (based on your posts here, my assumption: Single developer, or developer with a couple of contractors; production site; 1-5K visits per month; non time-sensitive/mission-critical service.) you probably don't need high-availability auto-failover. But, you SHOULD have your DNS hosted separate from your hosting provider, you SHOULD have low TTL's, you SHOULD have a backup server in a warm state at some other provider, and you SHOULD know how to at least do a basic DNS update to redirect traffic over to a backup site that either runs the service or puts up a basic, friendly "OOPS, BRB" page.
I've often thought of a startup that would basically human-automate these things for guys like you. You still wouldn't be 100% self-sufficient, but you would be able to outsource SOME of your entire reliance on 1 provider. You'd then have to have 2 tiers of total failure (your provider, and this service) to encounter complete down time.
The Internet is filled with news about hosting provider provided backups being unusable for a number of reasons at inopportune times.
You should have a backup copy of your code/databases in your control, on a machine that is completely independent from whatever you are doing your production hosting on. You should have done a "warm metal" install and test of that code another server to be sure that you can recover operations in a reasonable amount of time (whatever is appropriate for your case).
For your scale (based on your posts here, my assumption: Single developer, or developer with a couple of contractors; production site; 1-5K visits per month; non time-sensitive/mission-critical service.) you probably don't need high-availability auto-failover. But, you SHOULD have your DNS hosted separate from your hosting provider, you SHOULD have low TTL's, you SHOULD have a backup server in a warm state at some other provider, and you SHOULD know how to at least do a basic DNS update to redirect traffic over to a backup site that either runs the service or puts up a basic, friendly "OOPS, BRB" page.
I've often thought of a startup that would basically human-automate these things for guys like you. You still wouldn't be 100% self-sufficient, but you would be able to outsource SOME of your entire reliance on 1 provider. You'd then have to have 2 tiers of total failure (your provider, and this service) to encounter complete down time.