Hi guys

I had a problem the other day with a site and it was down for 24 hours but could have been longer. I had a similar situation years ago with a client who lost (he guestimated) around 5,000 € simply because the site was down for a week.

So, with this in mind I am thinking of replicating the site I have and placing it on a server but turned off so it doesn't display duplicate content to the search engines but what I need to know is what's the best way of redirecting traffic...?

The website in question has a reservations engine sat behind it, if this goes down (the reservations engine) then no big deal, I can simply point people to another reservations engine I have sat on another server but if the main website goes down (for whatever reason) I'm losing money and I need to find a way round this.

Has anyone else had a similar issue and how did they find a solid solution...?

Well when your web site is down the redirect will not work as well due to that Because whole server will not work.

Firstly I would say get better hosting. There are plenty of hosts out there who have a great uptime etc.

but lets go into the question anyways.

Here is what I would do then. This is all just off of the top of my head and speculation of how it COULD be done. There might be some flaws in my thinking.

Make a replication of the site on alternative hosting. But make sure the replication is setup with the NOINDEX META when you are not using it.

then when your hosting goes down you could redirect the domain to the alternate hosting & remove the NOINDEX META to help prevent any deindexing or whatnot.

I would think that something along these lines would work.