The "BEST" way to do this would be an application that is coded for session sickyness(that it if your site is databsae run where users login or if you have something like a shopping cart), you would build it out with a back end DB Active-Passive Cluster, then 2 or more active nodes in your HTTP server cluster with an Big IP F5 in front. Now this is quite $$$ but you asked what the best way is so there you have it.

Granted you have a point that it is not a extremely large amount but that's still way more than needed to take database backups. That's what the $1200 computer I mentioned was for, really you could have done it with half that
  Then an hour of a sys admins time to set a cron job to do a database dump then scp or rsync it somewhere. I have customers with 1 /100th the traffic yet they still have database backups. They even grab them manually down to their home machine every couple weeks via a web based open source tool
  Money has no place in defending this even. It's human ignorance or laziness , period

You pay your infrastructure people to maintain business, continuity I mean the tittle of this post made me go, "Really, no shit" That's like systems admin 101! If the admin was aware then the manager that didn't listen needs to be fired. If the manager listened and they are just run by retards then they got what they deserve. You'd think 17,000 visitors a month would be worth enough to do it right, in add revenue alone. The cost of a consumer machine running linux with a few TB's of SATA space - $1200 How much the company paid to have a system's admin play video games all day - $50,000 The cost of a 17,000 vistor a month site going down because they had no data base backups - Priceless.

There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!

Umm.. I preferred the unlimited plans. Than there is no worries, just like a house phone. Only you scream at it more often when the internet is slow.

55318008.. oh the day's of pagers.. 911 :)