Posting a notice that Auction Sniper's servers are down -- in a forum apparently hosted by said servers after the fact -- is totally lame and inadequate. I learned of the failure by having my snipes fail to be submitted.
AuctionSniper needs to build redundancy in their system, at several levels. First, bids can be submitted more than once, by two different server sites. Competitors do this now. Second, a separate notification service should be set up, on a different server, to email people who will be affected by an outage of considerable magnitude.
As it is, the only remedy that may motivate changes here is for people like myself to shift business away from AuctionSniper, unless of course AuctionSniper agrees publicly to make the necessary changes now.