Hosting companies have problems. Even the best hosting companies have problems… We try our best to use top-of-the-food-chain hosting for our apps where affordable, but even then we run into problems.

When things do go wrong, are all your chickens in one egg? Wait-all your chickens in one basket? -ahem. Are all your eggs in one basket?

We have a very simple but useful tip… We use multiple hosting accounts on multiple hosts. Plus we have alternate ways to get information out when needed…

• We keep our blog, and our apps on 2 separate hosting companies servers. They’re remote from each other, and totally unrelated infrastructure-wise. The chances of both going down at once is as remote as we could hope for.

• We keep our backups on S3 also. While our most recent backups sit on our own machines, we also push our backups nightly to our S3 account. This way the pieces that change nightly get pushed to backup servers dispersed around the world, just in case.

• When all else fails, we have Twitter! For months now, we have been making an effort to follow, and to get followed by our users. If the backup that backs up the backup should fail, at least we have a way to spread the information.

We’re advocates of not overbuilding infrastructure in your web apps. But with the cheap hosting, and free communication tools available today, there’s not much excuse for not having several backup plans.