Thanks to Brion and all who helped out with the outage. Bad things happen despite the best of preparations, and even in hindsight I doubt if anything could have been done aside from the costly and impractical alternative of having a fully redundant site off in a bunker somewhere. Not all failures can be foreseen.
In the interest of harm reduction for the future, I would like to recommend the excellent services of the folks at easydns.com, who provided reliable secondary services and mail queuing for me for some years while I was handling IT stuff for an employer. Their prices are cheap, they have competent technical support, and they have a network of secondaries on at least two continents. I would suggest that we include them in our plans even if other measures are taken.
Best regards
The Uninvited Co., Inc. (a Delaware corporation)