It has been over three years since hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans. Luckily, it did not affect me, but a friend who was running a business was affected greatly by the storm. You see, he had his web site hosted in New Orleans - more accurately, his web based business was on servers there. He lives on the other side of the country, but when the power went out and eventually the servers ended up underwater - he was out of business. Not just for the duration of the cataclysmic hurricane, but forever - his business could not recover.

If he had multiple webhosting accounts, he could have either manually moved the business over to another host physically located away from New Orleans or had an automated fail-over process that would transfer his customers from the location that was down, to another location. I am not saying this is easy, just saying that it is prudent and worth the time and money invested to keep a web based business going during times of disaster.

Take a gander at the top rated web hosts and see where they are physically located in relation to each other. If one is in San Francisco, you would be smart to consider something East of there - like a thousand miles east! In case of earthquake, switch from San Fran to your mid-west provider and you are golden. Conversely, if there is a major blizzard in the mid-west, then your hosting in San Fran keeps your customer’s happy. Learn more about DNS and how it can help you in these situations. With a little extra effort, there are few excuses for having a web based business fail because of disaster if you are prepared.