Thanks for all the replies guys.

I did expect that the solution would be to have a second VPS in the picture, and I am very happy with that. These things arent really that expensive these days. A developer or system admins time just managing that one day of turmoil would pay for a vps for a year.

So, how do I go about setting that up at a DNS level, once I have my two VPS servers running? Having looked at the link and suggestions in the posts made I'm not really any wiser. The secondary DNS thing seems to be about preparing for a nameserver failure, where as what I want to do is get the nameservers to point to a second IP address if the first one is unreachable.

Regarding the reliability of the host - the downtime was because I requested a resource upgrade, but there were not enough resources available on the hardware used by my VPS to allocate what I asked for. So they had to move the entire VPS to new hardware in order to accomodate my request. I dont see that as a reliability issue with the host, as annoying as it may have been.

Thanks