well what they did for me is actually pretty nice of them. The DB is backed up every hour, and they stick the backup file in a virtual directory on the webserver. I will then automate a download of this file a few times a day so in the event of a problem we can load the backup here on the local SQL Server and run off of that...

I also found out that if you specify "restore from a device" and then select file from there.. it doesn't matter what the extension is.. it will restore