My host of four years has been giving me excellent service, BUT. In the last week, they have had several downtimes (that I an aware of). For me thats real bad.

Is there a way to have a second host for the same IP address, not for e-mail, just the public pages of the site.

Thanks in advance for your answer.

You can have 2nd hosting host or a backup host. Just configure your registrar secondary DNS server to your backup host DNS.