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One of my favorite topics is all about being prepared. I'll talk to newbies forever about being prepared for all contingencies, things like hard drive failures and other hardware failures. I talk about backing up, budgeting for new equipment, being ready to cope if the checks don't turn up on time.

But the one thing I've never talked about being ready for is what to do if your ISP suddenly stops working for you. I probably haven't talked about that because, while most ISPs do go down occasionally it's usually only for short periods of time. I would never have expected an ISP - the biggest in the country - to go down for over 24 hours - but now that's happened to me.

At about 4am on Easter Sunday morning something happened at our ISP that cut us off from any site hosted in the USA and 24 hours later we're still unable to access sites in the United States. We have no problems accessing sites here in Australia or sites hosted in Europe but anything in North America is returning a 404.

Of course I shouldn't have expected much in the way of customer service at 7am on Easter Sunday but I did. However, the reality was something quite different. Our ISP outsourced their customer service to India and I happened to get one of the most useless customer service officers you could imagine.

He tried to tell me that it was in my settings and I would have to change them. When I pointed out that I couldn't access Google.com on my cell phone and so it couldn't have been an issue with the settings on my computer he was instantly out of options. At least he told me he would report it.

Some hours later when nothing had happened I called again and was told that the technicians had just begun working on the problem and it would be fixed soon. So why didn't they start working on it when I first reported it? It seems that the first guy I spoke to chose to do nothing with my complaint.

This morning at 6am when it still wasn't fixed so I called again and was told that they were still working on the problem. When would it be fixed? This Indian customer service officer wasn't sure but when I suggested that they probably had to replace some equipment and couldn't source the new equipment till Australia got back to work on Tuesday he agreed that was the situation.

Fortunately we do have a fallback position but it's not a very convenient one. The ISP we use at the computer shop is different to the one we use at home and they're not having any troubles at all. So for the little bit of work we've wanted to do over the weekend we simply load up our flash drives and head down to the shop.

But what would you do if you didn't have an option like that? What would you do if your ISP went down for an extended period and you had no fallback positon?

I have to admit that I had been thinking about getting a second broadband connection with a different ISP at home for some months now but had never done anything more than just think about it. Now though I'll certainly be doing a whole lot more than just thinking because if we didn't have the connection at the shop we would be in some serious bother if we had no connection for such a long time.

And so would you. You don't have to be in this industry for very long before an uninterrupted Internet connection becomes completely indispensable to the success of your business. That means that you really do need to ensure that you have access to the Net at all times.

Of course a second broadband connection with a different ISP may not come cheap and it could be outside your budget. If it is then there's always good old dial-up. You might think that a 56k dial-up account is so like ancient history and after using a broadband connection transferring files via dial-up can be like watching the grass grow.

However what's better, no connection or a slow connection? A dial-up connection can be an absolute lifesaver if you have no other way of connecting to the Net. A dial-up connection also has the advantage of being rather cheap and that makes it ideal as a back up in case your broadband ISP suddenly has a problem that can't be fixed in anything like a reasonable time.

So don't wait for your ISP to go down before doing something about getting a second connection. Do it now and ensure that your business can go on functioning while your ISP mucks around for days making excuses.