Did you miss me?

Turns out my hosting provider had a multi-day DNS problem last week, so OpenParenthesis was closed from Thursday am through late Saturday.

(My wife’s site came back faster - its DNS service was restored by Friday afternoon, but that’s still long enough for email to start bouncing to clients).
What’s the average blogger to do?

Either

• you host with one of the blogging services (blogger, wordpress.com, etc), in which case you are more-or-less at their mercy, and you’re down when they are, or
• you host with an independant hosting facility, in which case you’re at their mercy, or
• you run your own server at home, in which case you’re at the mercy of the cable company, telco, or whatever else connects you to the ‘net.

In any case, if you’re just another toiler in the vineyard of the blogosphere, and not a blog superstar, how do you cost-effectively get reasonable uptime?

How do you get them to listen to puny old you while the clients who really spend $$$ are complaining?
If you’ve got recommendations for solid hosting facilities (PHP and MySQL a must, Rails perhaps) let ‘em rip.