As Tessitura RAMP access is down for the second time this month and fourth time since we put tickets on sale in January, I'd like to hear what if any contingency plans others have set up for system downtime. We've only had one instance of being down during our actual Festival, but we did have a few hours during our Donor Presale that we were down and it was a nightmare.
Heidi,
It sounds as if you have a use case that would justify self-hosting. As long as your hosted off premise your connectivity from end to end will most likely be your Achilles heel. The more systems and hops you put between those end points, the more likely you are to experience a disruption. And, as you pointed out... when you have a disruption you loose complete system functionality because everything relies on your connection to the destination host environment.