Quote:
Originally posted by LBBV
In the grand scheme of things, name servers have very little to do with overall redundancy. For instance, unless I have two different locations, if my network is down, having a name server somewhere else does no good at all. While you may be able to resolve my domain names, you still can't get to the sites.
In a properly set up name server environment, the secondary name server is automatically updated by the primary. Should the primary go down, the secondary will answer requests. Also, anyone who is serious about redundancy will have a spare primary server set up ready to put in place should the primary fail. This can be achieved very easily.
As for your hotmail question...if you do a traceroute on those 4 name servers, you will see that they all wind up on the same network. While you may occasionally see a company that has their name servers on two different IP blocks, there are very few that actually have their name servers on entirely different networks located in different facilities (for the reason I explained in my first paragraph).
Name servers are just hardware. Keep spares around and all is good. Making sure that the sites and network are always up is the most important part, and that's done through an overall plan. 
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I just have to say... this is how I feel about the subject. Multiple spares when it comes to networking hardware (switches et al), a spare primary nameserver just sitting there waiting... $10k in spare inventory so I can throw a server together or fix a broken one in no time.
We are a smaller company... our salaries are only around $20K per month. Bandwidth still is our biggest cost.
In descending order:
bandwidth
salaries
rackspace
harwdare
office space (and everything included like insurance and whatnot)
We have put together a pretty solid product - we haven't had a network outage in two years. Sure we have had some servers go thru a hardware issue or a wild home made script eat up all available file handles or something but those problems are all easily resolved.
Webmasters are just easily fooled by glitz and glam.