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?