Yesterday my hosting account got suspended due to another domain using excess bandwidth. This meant visitors to my site were redirected to an error page, and I couldn’t log into the control panel or even access the site via SSH or FTP. Normally this would be a disaster, as you’re locked out of your own site at the mercy of customer support. Not for me however!

I had configured my domain’s DNS servers to use freedns.afraid.org, which in turn pointed to the ukhost4u account. Sure, this adds an extra layer of requests to the loading time, but when the hosting goes down, all I had to do was import the latest database backup on my home server, flip the DNS records to my own ip at freedns, and my site was back online with minimal downtime. Slightly annoyingly after that work, ukhost4u’s customer service turned out to be excellent, and we had the issue resolved in a couple of hours. Now I just need to swap the DNS records back again…