Hosting Company Suffering DDoS Attack

Grundlterror

The hosting company that hosts my website (3iX) has been suffering a DDoS attack for the last several days, which has made my site inaccessible during this time. I'm not too familiar with DDoS attacks (although I do have a basic understanding). Shouldn't most web hosting companies have protection against this kind of attack, and a backup server/plan if they do suffer the attack? It is imperative that my site does not go down for this amount of time... even an hour a day may be too much.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to make sure this doesn't happen with my site again? Suggestions for a new hosting company? Suggestions for how I can be compensated by 3iX for this downtime? Horror stories about 3iX?

edit- online chat conversation:

Chat24x7: Welcome to 3iX live chat, my name is Lisa, please hold for a moment, I am reviewing your question.
Chat24x7: What is your domain/site name?
Todd: xxxxxxxx.org
Chat24x7: The server on which your account is hosted is undergoing with very heavy DDos attack thats why the server is null-routed and all the websites are inaccessible. The server will be online once the attack will be minimal, Currently we are working on the issue to correct it.
Todd: so is this a security issue?
Chat24x7: Ues
Chat24x7: Yes
Todd: my site has been down for two days now, I can't have this in the future. Will I be compensated at all for these downtimes?
Todd: shouldn't most servers have DDos protection?
Chat24x7: No
Todd: well this is very frustrating and I'm not being helped too much
Todd: I have a friend who hosts his website with you guys as well and his site is active
Chat24x7: ??
Todd: so there's no timeline for when my site will be back up?
Todd: so there's no timeline for when my site will be back up?
Chat24x7: No, there is no ETA
Todd: so it could be down for another month or two? you guys have no idea
Todd: i'll have to talk to billing about this because this is entirely unacceptable

dispatch.o

3iX as far as I know isn't in the business of hosting commercial websites. I don't think there's anything you can do other than switch hosts. I don't know of any that will compensate you for downtime however.

Caelum Militis

Regarding Compensation:

This is from their webpage, under Legal -> Service Level Agreement

http://www.3ix.org/service_level_agreement.php

Basically, they may comp you if you request it, but they may claim this as an "act beyond their control", which gets no compensation.

Honestly with webhosting, you (mostly) get what you pay for. Looking at 3ix's rates and such, this is a consumer level hosting company. If you honestly can't afford for your site to be down for even an hour a day, you should probably shell out the money for a commercial hosting company/package, with an SLA giving 99.99% (or higher) uptime, etc. Things can still go wrong no matter who your host is, though.

Krikee

As Caelum Militis mentioned, you get what you pay for in web hosting. They will promise you the world on the website but double check the SLA before you sign on with them. Also, 0 percent down-time is a myth. Price and down-time have an exponential decay relationship. The more you pay, the less downtime due to redundant network, hardware & software design on top of all the security measures in place. Enterprise IPS class systems are easily $15,000-$20,000 for a new system that only handles half a gigabit of information a second.

As for them having no ETA on the return, all this means is they don't have the security measures in place to control this and they are at the mercy of whoever is doing it to shut it off.