Wow, in todays day and age, hard drive crashes should not take down a server or site. Is it privately hosted in someones basement or at a real hosting company? If it's in some hosting company's data center, I would be looking for a new host.
There is no reason for a server to crash these days. Maintenance or loosing a main backbone are the only reasons for a site to be down. Between SAN's (or at least RAID) drives and clustered virtual servers with fail-over...server hardware should never be an excuse.