We are moving our small business E-commerce Web Server onto a dedicated host at SkyNetWeb. We have the option of SCSI RAID Level 1 but it almost doubles the hosting price (from around $250 to $500 per month.)

This is a FreeBSD system. I know on NT you can have the software configure multiple hard drives into RAID so you can use inexpensive IDE drives. I'm wondering a couple of things:

1) Is it worth the hassle or cost to use RAID. Our site is responsible for ringing up about $100K in sales per month so uptime is fairly crucial. (I have no idea what SkyNetWeb's response time will be if a hard drive fails.)

2) Is there an equivalent software-based RAID solution for freeBSD that we could use instead of paying double for hardware-based SCSI RAID and would the performance be decent?

Thanks.

I don't mean any offense... but your site is ringing up $100K a month in sales, and you're worried about a couple hundred dollars a month difference for hardware RAID? That seems absurd to me.

Hardware SCSI RAID is absolutely the only way to go when data integrity, uptime, and performance are important to you. IDE Raid is getting to an acceptable level as well with the 3Ware Escalade cards. (I wouldn't touch any others.)

I do have to say, though, that an extra $150 a month just for RAID, on top of SCSI, sounds a little high. Good entry-level Mylex RAID cards can be had for about $450 new.

1. (Speaking from a friend's experiences...) skynetweb's support is mediocre during the day and practically nonexistant at night. I wouldn't want to rely upon them to rebuild your system quickly if a hard drive failed.

2. You can use vinum to provide software RAID 1. In almost all cases the performance will be equal to a hardware solution. (2-disk RAID 1 is about as simple as you can get; for RAID 0 or 5 there is usually a performance delta between hardware and software solutions).

You haven't made entirely clear one important issue though: is it *uptime* which is important, or is it *not losing data* which is important?

[FTR, I started writing this post before either the followup or reply were posted, but got distracted replying to an email before I actually posted this]

Thanks for the replies. Regarding the point about revenue versus histing costs, you don't have one important part of the equation to give you a clear picture -- overhead. We are operating like a typical dot com startup and are barely breaking even even at $100k a month so $1,800 a year difference in cost is significant to us -- but your point is well taken.

Glad to hear about the software solution. Just hope it doesn't cost us $1,800 a year in admin time to setup and administrate?

Uptime, not data loss is the main goal.

If cost is a concern... get a $129 3Ware card and hook a couple of 7200 RPM IDE drives up to it. You'll get good, real, hardware raid and the associated uptime for very little money.

That would be doable if the server wasn't in a data center 5,000 miles away.

And your host won't oblige? Shame on them. :)