Downtime of website and adsense !

My website was down for 5 hours and my adsense revenue has gone down to one third of what I was earning. Previously when the site was down the loss was mainly because of the site not being accessible for that period. But last time the site went down, I missed the google robots visits and now for lot of keywords my site has gone down in its rankings. Its really painful !!

1) If you have experienced such a thing, how much time does it take for your site to regain its popularity.

2) How do you ensure your server is up always? Which host provides close to 100% uptime?

3) Do you employ any failover service for your servers ... like having a redundancy . ie a secondary server to handle requests when main server is down?

I am setting up a failover service .. planning to host my site on two servers and have it monitored and switching to the second server when first is down.

 

Check the Google cache to see when was your site last visited. And check to see how frequently google comes back to recheck your site by checking the cache over a few weeks. Read how to check when your site was indexed.

How can you be sure Google bot came down during those 5 hours?

 

I saw a few of my pages missing from google's index for a day. And then they appeared but quite low in the search results.

 

On my old hosting it seemed like the server would go down for 30 minutes to an hour at least once a week.... Since none of my sites ranked back then I couldn't tell if it was costing me rankings, but after it happened several times I immediately switched hosts.

 

My normally wonderful server was down for an hour today...given that I am serving all the pictures on my lingerie blog from there I figured no revenue for me...In fact, my click through rate was up a little.

Nothing to see so the surfers clicked on an ad to leave...Hmmm

 

Which host is the most reliable ? I am sick of downtime.

 

I couldn't say. Depends on your needs, some of my sites require SQL, PHP, CGI, etc... my biggest forum takes 80GB bandwidth and looks to exceed that this month ... for it i use lunarpages, and in 15 months they've only gone down 1 time for about an hour. They're kinda pricey for my taste but you can't beat reliability.

 

I think its fair to say all hosts have downtime, we have 2 servers with Pipex, have also considered MCI and in the US we use Verio. Out of the 3, Verio in the US have had the most uptime.

Fasthost in the UK seem to have the best deal on dedicated servers at the mo.

This site (http://www.uk.tophosts.com/) ranks all the UK hosts each month, but they don't just base it on servers.. interesting all the same.