Well, honestly we've been upgrading our setup over the years. Currently we have two servers, one for the db, one for the webserver, both of which have just been installed and upgraded. Right now we're running RAID-10 on the db server, RAID-5 on the webserver, and we're rsynching them back and forth nightly.
Previous to the new servers we didn't have this capability because the servers didn't have the horsepower, and quite frankly, because BFC isn't exactly a money making operation. The two new servers we just put in cost over $9000 total and when this site barely breaks even on hosting costs, you can imagine what that does to the budget. Prior to this, we had two seperate servers that barely kept pace with the load, and prior to that we had a series of single servers.
As far as an automated email list goes, emailing the paying members would require the forums software to be up and running, and if it's up and running, there's no need to email them.
We honestly didn't anticipate the downtime to be as severe as it was, but given that this was a catastrophic failure that occurred on a Friday night, and required an entirely new server to be built and configured, on a tight budget, we did the best we could. If BFC was a "paying members only" community, then either we wouldn't need all the server resources and wouldn't experience such failures, or we'd have plenty of income coming in to cover more extravagent backup & redundancy plans. As it is, BFC is primarily a giant hole in my wallet that I operate at a loss to give something back to the knife community, and as such, is limited in what safety measures are available.
