Hi Dana,
I appreciate that very much.
I am very sorry to hear about the down time obviously not be able to view a site is the worst user experience possible.
Fire host is the best host available. For an e-commerce website I would very strongly recommend using them there uptime is legendary and their services absolutely awesome. What you might pay for a little bit in security you will receive back and peace of mind along with a reduction of cost from your POS provider because of their PCI 3 compliant hosting you should be able to save quite a bit on Visa and MasterCard I know American Express does not participate in this.
Running on fire host you don't do any work at all if there's a problem with the server you simply let them know via ticket or via phone 24 7 somebody is there. They will put your site on DynECT DNS for only $10 a very good deal. And offer edge cast the fastest CDN available at a very reasonable price. You can always save money on the CDN by using MaxCDN with fire host.
However if that's not an option here are 2 others
Digital ocean is a company that is very new, but has very high quality equipment however they're not managed Sucuri can do that for you. I think they would make a great synergy and you could have a failover VPS here it is below.
the very best post for any e-commerce site is going to be fire host they give you everything you need and their uptime is impeccable It is absolutely unbelievable.
I have two solutions that I believe would be a good fit for your situation would be
https://www.linode.com/managed/ they charge $100 more than the actual server per month to manage it the server cost is surprisingly low so it's a pretty good deal.
https://www.linode.com/linodes/
Digital Ocean a rocket ship hosting provider that is going neck and neck with Linode both of them offer very impressive performance however digital ocean is significantly less money.
This is an excellent guide but switch out AWS for digital ocean or Linode
Using the tips in this website will give you what you need to have a very fast and robust website.
http://www.feedthebot.com
Sign up for Google page speed and implement it via the methods on the site
http://www.feedthebot.com/pagespeed/
With Google page speed runs its own CDN
http://wordimpress.com/aws-ec2-rds-s3-cloudfront-nginx-wordpress-tutorial-roundup/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/09/20/how-to-make-your-site-insanely-fast/
I would use two of the less expensive but just as fast digital ocean VPS is with a failover
Then run 2 VPS's on digital ocean at $20 a VPS they are a fantastic deal. Running Nginx instead of Apache will reduce your RAM consumption to 1/8 of what was before
$20 VPS
2GB Memory
2 Cores
40GB SSD Disk
3TB Transfer
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
Fastly & AWS cloud front (cloud front is now capable of running both static and dynamic content very impressive) or MaxCDN great pricing , rack space cloud files as a CDN would be a great mix.
So Fastly CDN with two 2GB VPS's on digital ocean each in separate data centers. Simply clone your site
With one of the 4 options Digital Ocean gives you here
digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-choose-an-effective-backup-strategy-for-your-vps
If you chose to use DNS with failover you could create a 100% uptime environment even if one of the servers or data centers went down. Or there were server issues. Within 2 min. you would be running on the other data center entirely.
Normally I would recommend DynECT they are my favorite however you can save money and get very close to the same performance using DNS made easy
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/dns-failover-system-monitoring/managed
You would be best off selecting either the $50 a year plan or the $25 a year plan then paying $5 a year for a failover I would buy the mid tier plan it comes with a lot more.
If you spent $40 a month you could get a rocket ship that would allow you 2 gigs of RAM for each VPS setup
DNS with DNS made easy either purchase the $50 a year plan or purchase the $25 year plan and add the
The best security for the money at $9 a month is definitely the Sucuri CloudProxy
Web Application Firewall (WAF) · Virtual Website patching · Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) · DDOS and Brute force protection · Prevent malware and blacklisting
http://cloudproxy.sucuri.net
Video
http://cloudproxy.sucuri.net/features#feature-patch
Digital Ocean has so quite a few data centers in the United States. All you have to do is run a script to clone your site because the pricing of digital ocean starts at $5 a month for one core with 512 MB of RAM and full SSD's all high-end equipment.
One smart way if you want to run a managed server on digital ocean is to hire Sucuri they will do it for the same price Linode charges and give you quite a bit. Meaning you will not have to worry about any sort of security issues or server problems.
Because your site will failover in under 2 min. in the event of an issue and the digital ocean infrastructure is designed to let you clone your site on another data center no matter what happens to your 1st site you can always move over to your 2nd. Your DNS will do this for you in under 2 min. automatically if using DNS made easy
Sucuri MSSP - Managed Server Security Program
Over the past 12 months there has been a sharp increase in the evolution of website attacks, where attackers are tunneling deeper beyond the application layer and affecting various infrastructure elements. Because of this, we're releasing our new program - Managed Server Security Program (MSSP).
What is included?
This program utilizing a number of our own proprietary products to assist in managing the security of private servers (dedicated and virtual). The product will offer you a number of the following services:
Professional management of your web servers security
System audit of your environment, recommendation and security implementations
Installation and configuration of our File Integrity Monitoring Daemon (FIMD)
Installation and configuration of our Realtime Enterprise Log Management (RELM) AND LIDS - log-based intrusion detection system
Real time management and security response teams in the event of compromise
Who should use this service?
Any website owner that is responsible for their own web server, whether utilizing a VPS or a dedicated box. It is not for shared-hosts.
Sincerely,
Thomas
5WLPWit.png