Methods, systems, and computer-readable media are provided for the automated preservation and downtime mitigation of server-based databases and applications. Read and write operations intended for a database may be communicated to a load balancer. The load balancer may direct the operations to a primary server and/or a backup server. Further, during periods of primary server downtime, write-based tasks, operations, and/or requests of remote applications may be deactivated by the load balancer. Additionally, the load balancer may prevent corruption of backup databases from coming out of sync, and/or unexpected, undesirable, or unwanted data modification by deactivating, denying, locking, or otherwise preventing the write operations of the backup server.