We received the following notification from the New York data center we use:

Please be aware that there is a severe storm headed our direction and will be hitting the New York area around Saturday evening and will last until Sunday evening EST time.

The state has declared this an emergency situation and has asked to be prepared for several disaster related issues such as flooding, power outages, and food shortages.

The data center is being prepared for any such disasters by double checking all the UPS and Generator power systems. We have also asked all staff to be available in case of any emergencies at the data center.

There will be staff at the data center present throughout the storm and will be backed up by various engineering and systems teams However, you as a customer should still prepare for disaster recovery.

Please take the next several hours to back up your data offsite and to make any other arrangements in case your servers become inaccessible for any reason.

If you are running a VPS server then note that you are able to move your VPS (permanently or temporarily) to a server in a different data center.

A move may be appropriate to avoid risks of hurricane damage, state wide networking issues, or hurricane related power problems.

Here is a video showing you how the move process works http://www.youtube.com/user/rimuhosting#p/a/u/4/nU4FcL_EL3s

You are also able to order a new server, install it as a clone of a NY-based server then keep it as a backup until any hurricane threat is past (then cancel it and get a prorated credit).

You are welcome to use our http://bakop.com offsite backup service to make any offsite backups that you need.  (Note the the backupspace.rimuhosting.com service is located in NY so is not suitable as an offsite backup for NY-based customers).

For a discussion on the storm and any discussion on backup and recovery procedures see: http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2011/08/27/new-york-storm/