martin cohen

I'm the 'computer guy' at a small company in Hood River. I've been with

the company 15 years, and it's the only place I've worked that we've

used the internet. We use a local IP for our wireless internet connect

and another firm for our web hosting/email services. Problem is both of

those have been going down way too much lately, and we're stuck without

communication to customers, etc. Sales isn't too happy, needless to say.



How do you increase the reliability of those services? Should we get our

own server and do our own hosting? For those of you who have 99.9% or

greater uptime, how are you set up? What about the reliability of web

services like Google Gmail or Yahoo email? We only have about 25 - 30

full time email users.



I'm in 'discussions' with our providers currently. My impression is they

both are growing much faster than their ability to provide good support.

I'm trying to find out if they offer a fallback, or redundant procedure

in case the primary server goes down. Ideas?



Thanks,

Martin