If you host your own webiste, where should you host the emergency website

I'm assuming from your question that you are hosting your site internally within your office. In that case, you could get a hosting account and set it up to be your backup, and you could use software to do the backup automatically to eliminate extra work. If security is a big issue, then you might have to get a dedicated server account, which would cost more, but well worth it if you ever lost your site. If you have offices in other locations, set up a backup there and also configure it to backup automatically.

I were to host your site with a company, choose a hosting company that has a backup system in place. We host our sites with Rochen because we use Joomla and they optimize for Joomla. But one of the benefits of Rochen is that they have the Rochen Vault. Several times a day they back up all their servers, and even if you only need to restore one file, you can login to the vault and restore what you want. We don't even have to worry about creating backups anymore because they do it for us. And of course the vault is not the same server and it's located somewhere else. We still take down backups once a month and store them on drives in our office, but that's just an added precaution.

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It depends on where you are hosting the primary site and what your goals are in terms of disaster recovery. At a very simple level, I never liked the concept of keeping a perfectly good server sitting around doing nothing. That is I don't like using off line emergency backups. If we had 2 servers, we would use both and distributed the load between them. That way we got better performance, used our investment and if one failed, the other took the traffic.

As for where, if you are looking for true fault tolerance, you want to host it with a provider that satifies the following:

1. Different geographic location (for physical disasters that bring down the primary site).
2. Different network providers. Most hosts use multiple, so make sure that there is at least one primary provider that is different from yours
3. Different Internet exchange points. Ask the host for a network map, including where traffic is exchanged with other network providers. You want to ensure that the traffic in the backup is routing differently from the primary. In most cases this is not an issue, but since it is an emergency site, you want to make sure.

That should cover you.