Earlier this month, an IT disaster hit some of Seattle’s most successful companies. Fisher Plaza was one of the most advanced communication hubs in the world, but even it wasn’t invincible. The fire and power outage at this data center knocked out several top web sites, including Allrecipes.com and Bing Travel. IT disasters happen all the time. Question is: are you prepared?

Redfin, a Seattle-based real estate site, was one of the first to notice a problem. At 1 a.m., they announced on Twitter that their site was offline. But by 4 a.m., the site was back. How did Redfin, a small business, manage to recover faster than corporate web sites? Redfin CTO Michael Young shares the secret to their success:

We were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ resonated in our brains.

So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings.

When the problem happened last night, our beepers went off, we saw what looked like a major outage in one building, and were able to switch to the redundant systems.

Everything was up and running by 4am PST / 7am EST, well before our core business hours. We’re a startup, but we try to maintain high standards in our datacenter operations without spending too much money. The failover didn’t happen at the push-of-a-button, but the disaster planning paid off for us.

Moral of this story: It pays to have an effective disaster recovery plan.