HaHa !

StarrerGang
I was a freelance allinOne Webdesigner for some years and dare to give some advice:
[snip]
For a standard setup in PHP & mySQL backend with few page impressions and transfer volume
I highly recommend a mass hoster. They are very cheap and have nice data center with all the backup strategies.
You as a webdesigner can even become a powerseller and nobody notices that someone else hosts it.
I hosted a dozen customers and my own website at 1and1.com. All happy with it and less than a tenner a month for
a setup like at BLB. The server should not be underneath some desk. Its not worth it

For advice dared to be given, perhaps fact checking first is in order? If you check the IP number of BLB.co.uk, you'll see it belongs to the New Dream Network, which is http://www.dreamhost.com . Shockingly this is precisely the type of package you recommend, that is to say that it is hosted just as you would've hosted it.

Now, the database is down. That can happen for a split second with MySql. You only need a flood of connections on the server, a tmp file corruption, and the database will recover by ditching the tmp files, recycling and issuing a new lock file before coming up again.

It's dreamhost, so how many sites will be on each front end web server? Or do they share file storage over vast arrays and load balance front ends? In which case, what are the odds that the number of sites on each server, the network infrastructure, etc can all conspire to flummox out MySql and cause a hiccup in the connection. Not impossible by a long shot, MySql does such things.

At times this site rocks out. It's only one of 10 sites on a very powerful server, all low volume, RAID'd SCSI drives, multi-core dual server CPU's, stacks of RAM. And yet, still the database will occasionally see fit to throw a hissyfit and drop connections.

This stuff just happens. It's the internet, and nothing on it is perfect and perfectly available.

And jonaent has done a stunning job. The only thing I'd critique him for is one very small thing, a prettier (static) error page. Beyond that, he's done superbly.

Just consider for a moment how bad most bike websites look. And how appalling most bike shops online look. BLB may have (no experience, so I don't know) a bad mechanic and a blagger behind the till, but the website raises the bar for bicycle shops and I'm pretty glad it does. Have you even seen what the Bob Jackson website looks like?!