Robert_Charlton - 5:23 am on Sep 26, 2009 (gmt 0)

Recently my website has been going down every week for hours.

If your site is going down that often, I suggest you do get a new web host. I don't know what your hosting requirements are, but you can get a dedicated IP on a shared server for not much money a month.

Advice here about not hosting with your registrar is right on.

I would say also that you should not host your DNS in the same location as your webhost, as that's a shared point of vulnerability.

I'd recommend hosting your DNS (A-records) with a separate company that specializes in DNS hosting. Such companies also offer fail-over DNS monitoring. They monitor an html file on your site, and if they can't connect with that file, they automatically switch your DNS over to a backup host. With such a setup, you would want to keep your backups current.

You'd have to set up backup hosting at a second hosting company. This can get tricky if you need to keep two dynamic sites in sync. It's also not easy... particularly if you're using shared servers... to find two hosting companies that have their servers set up similarly enough that you host your site with the same .htaccess file on two different servers.

There are others much better able than I am to advise you on the details of setting up a backup system, but that's the overview.

Email backup is more complicated, and the usual solution, I've discovered, is simply to have your email cached on a backup server, when your main email server is down. It's very difficult to set up two email servers to provide continuous email service.