My website went live in April 2005, and my hosting company then was offline more than it was on. Even our grand opening was delayed by two days because their servers were down! Since we moved to BCS, downtime hasn't been an issue.
On the programming side, I use XCart 4, and I've learned so much from Carrie about maintaining my own site. I've bought numerous mods and had her install them. My site just gets better and better, and my customers love it. What could be better than that?!