Ask HN: What can one do to protect against hosting failures?

Right now AWS is having issues and I keep seeing arguments like "And that's why you don't put all your eggs in one basket." Day before yesterday MediaTemple's name-servers went down and many of my sites became unreachable. So what am I as a developer really supposed to do?

It's trivial to disable add-ons/APIs that add features to your site like Disqus but is there anything you can do if your host goes down or has networking issues? Is there a proper way to deploy data-driven sites to EC2, Rackspace, and MediaTemple so that it never goes down? I have yet to see an affordable host with 100% uptime.

I can understanding Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook having multiple data-centers for fail-over but what should small-shops do?