Tonight I got an email from a friend that my site was down. Sometimes, if Apache has been running for a long time on my vhost then for some reason the process id gets corrupted. I don't know if that has to do with the VPS or what. I never had that problem when I had my dedicated server. It happens so infrequently I rarely even notice. However, my usual task of just restarting Apache didn't work. I got an error message that the main site's docroot didn't exist. That was very strange and very disturbing. I got on the phone with the sysadmins at my hosting company and couldn't really find the culprit and they didn't have the automated backup of the site. The good news, as I was told, was that they could recreate the directory structure within one minute and get Apache up and running. SWEET! However, what about my site?! Though they offer backups for the VPS they are not guaranteed. I was not panicking because I keep all site changes backed up in subversion on a completed different host. Once the directory structure was put back in place all I had to do was check the latest copy of my site and I was backup and running. It was good to see and know that using best practices does ACTUALLY work. Imagine that.