Questions[providers](server)

I own several domain names, some for over a decade. A few years ago I moved them all to a Virtual Private Server, and all was well. A few months ago I had to move to a different VPS provider, which necessitated a new mail server, which I had to manage myself. It's now more than I can handle, and I want to move my email hosting entirely off my VPS and onto an e-mail provider, but leave my websites on my VPS. My domain registrar is different from my VPS provider (which I've heard is a good idea), so I'm looking at dealing with at least three different providers.

What do I need to know to avoid shooting myself in the foot, domain-wise? I'm a programmer, but not a sysadmin; I know just enough about DNS records to be dangerous.

For the sake of their reputation, I won't mention the names. But I'll just use:

Business I worked for previously - ABC Web Dev
Hosting company they used - XYZ Hosting

I recently found out that XYZ Hosting had some sort of incident where they ended up losing a lot of their client's data - including ABC Web Dev's. ABC Web Dev was able to recover some of their customer's websites, after pulling them from their local development computers and putting them up on another hosting provider. They ended up losing a lot of clients because of it and their reputation ruined.

I'm starting my own web dev company and I don't want to run into this same issue. I'm planning on using Rackspace but, although they are a great company, according to wikipedia they still have had downtime in their past. I thought it might be a good idea to try to run two providers at once, to ensure that if anything happened in one the websites would still be live because of the other.

I know the websites would have to be pulling from one server at all times, but if there's a way to redirect requests to the second server if the first one is down that would solve my issue.

As a note, we will have a staging environment setup locally which will allow for quick recovery if a provider did have any issues, however I'd like to avoid any downtime at all if possible.

So my questions are:

Has anyone tried running two providers simultaneously?

Would this be considered good practice or am I going too far?

Is there really any way to run two simultaneously where one server acts as a backup?

I need to get the authentication provider status of a web application available in IIS through C# or Python code.

Example: Is Basic Authentication available for X site?

NB: I am aware that this question is subjective, as it can't be defined precisely, but the answers should still be "objective": Country name, and what makes it legally safer.

EDIT: A) I am located in Germany. B) I am NOT looking for a place to offer pirated Software/Media; no binary on my site, except "profile icon".

Hello! I want to start publishing "social" websites / apps, and I found that the biggest initial problem is this: Any and all services I have to depend on, including Domain Registrar, DNS provider, Server/Cloud Provider, CDN Provider, ... even my Insurance Agent, basically say that they can "throw me out" if my website contains "unacceptable" content. It's always phrased in such a way that basically anything can fall under "unacceptable" content. This is very frustrating because you just can't fully control what users post on your "social website", and you so you basically have to expect when you go to bed that your site is going to be gone when you wake up. I've heard a lot of horror stories about this.

Since the "Terms Of Service" of all those providers are foremost to protect themselves from legal actions, and those legal actions depend on the country where they are located, it seems like the first step is to find which country is the "safest" to locate a site. "Safest" being defined as, where I am least likely to get in legal trouble with the local authorities, if some user posts something unacceptable in some way.

The main restriction is that it should also be a "well-connected" country, because there is no point in being "safe", if my users can't get to my sites, or the latency is unacceptable. I am targeting the English speaking people in any country as my future users.

For an ad agency, I need to find a good storage company.

There are some things to take in considerations :

• Support for different OS (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Xp/Vista) (if it matters)
• Internal/External systems (through internet or with dedicated servers)
• Redundancy (save on more than one disk and backups)
• Quick transfer
• Automation

Files to be backuped will mainly be PSD, AI files, and documents.

What should i need to know to choose a good provider ?

Any advises (if you know some to compare) (France)

Thanks.

EDIT :

Capicity is about ±2.5Tb

Budget is unknown, and open.