In the past I avoided a situation where the host completely died because i had luckily shifted my websites few weeks prior to the meltdown.
However, this insecure feeling of abruptly loosing my vps (resulting in all the websites going offline) has always been nagging me ever since. Yes I do maintain backups but if the host dies then a new host would imply change in ips . The delay in setup of a new vps/propagation of ips/dns would lead to at least a downtime of 1 or 2 days.
The solutions I have read about range from establishing a vps proxy fetching data from 2 separate vps. There are ip fail over mechanisms & etc. But the thing is most of these requires costy setups, the other alternative is cloud like solutions from amazon and stuff but those are even far more expensive.
Sooo, what I want to know is;
**Is there anything that can be done to mitigate these problems ?
Can we speedily setup an alternate host with as little downtime as possible or
can we actually avoid any downtime by employing a cost effective solution to make sure our websites are always up and running without having to worry about server or host woes?**
Any answers would be much appreciated, I am sure the combined knowledge of all the hosting world veterans here will be of immense help.