Help! Need bomber yet economical backup hosting!

[Endlessseason]

I've been using mewebhost for several years, hosting between 80-90 domains. Because I'm grandfathered into old pricing, there is nothing out there that can touch what I'm paying for hosting this many domains. Trouble is, they are just having too many service disruptions. If I had known the service would be like this I would have found a better solution a long time ago.
What I need help with is back up. What do your companies do for automatic, seamless hosting when your primary host drops? Who do you use, and how do you configure your setup so that when the primary dns can't be found in say .5 seconds, a backup host covers the lapse with the same content?

[backpack]

I've been using mewebhost for several years, hosting between 80-90 domains. Because I'm grandfathered into old pricing, there is nothing out there that can touch what I'm paying for hosting this many domains. Trouble is, they are just having too many service disruptions. If I had known the service would be like this I would have found a better solution a long time ago.
What I need help with is back up. What do your companies do for automatic, seamless hosting when your primary host drops? Who do you use, and how do you configure your setup so that when the primary dns can't be found in say .5 seconds, a backup host covers the lapse with the same content?

Can't you just add the new host's nameservers below the primary nameservers and it'll go there if the others don't work?

Also, are the 80-90 domains for one website each or are they mostly pointers? Most hosts let you have unlimited "parked" domains but only around 5-10 individual websites.

I use MySiteSpace.com because it's really cheap and gives you a lot of space. It is fairly reliable, and I've only had my whole site down once for a few hours in over a year of hosting. More frequent are short specific-service outages, like the mySQL downtime this morning.

[Baconzoo]

www.actwd.com

Thats my only contact to share. They will also let you have a dedicated web server which you can buy from Dell and they will backup and maintain it.

[Endlessseason]

Thank you. I'm looking into these suggestions now. Any others out there?

[Lurch]

I've built several web clusters, one of them for P&G. These were running in my company’s datacenter not at a hosting company so it might not be useful information for you...

Basically I put a hardware load balancer from Radware in front of my web servers. I then configure the load balancer to grab a specific page and look for specific string to verify the server is up and running and providing the proper content ( Our software developers wrote a wonderful Tomcat app that would eventually die after x # of hits and even though pages were being served the host should not be used). The test runs every 10 seconds and when it fails it removes the server from the farm and pages the operator. We had a similar setup in front of the DNS servers. Also you always run more than one load balancer in a failover configuration for obvious reasons.

One great side effect with a load balanced web farm is that you can perform software updates at any time of the day with 0 downtime.

Another thing you might consider is buying rack space at a co-lo, do the hosting your self and keep more of the profits. You can host your DNS at http://www.dyndns.com. I wanted to start a company doing something similar but was scared off when I looked at how flooded the market was.