I have webapp in development. I need to plan for what happens if the host goes down. I will lose some very recent session status (which I can live with) and everything else should be persistently stored in the database.

If I am starting up again after an outage, can I expect a good host to reconstruct the database to within minutes of where I was up to ? Or seconds ? Or should I build in a background process to continually mirror the database elsewhere ?

What is normal / sensible ?

Obviously a good host will have RAID and other redundancy so the likelihood of total loss should be low, and if they have periodic backups I should lose only very recent stuff but this is presumably likely to be designed with almost static web content in mind, and my site is transactional with new data being filed continuously (with a customer expectation that I don't ever lose it).

Any suggestions / advice ?

Are there off the shelf frameworks for doing this ? (I'm primarily working in Java) And should I just plan to save the data or should I plan to have an alternative usable host implementation ready to launch in case the host doesn't come back up in a suitable timeframe ?