Maintenance Tips for Web Hosts - Using RAID
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Next, a web hosting company can use mirrored RAID drives. This option will cost $50-$80/month more, but it provides the fastest possible recovery in case of a hard drive crash. You can just reboot using the mirrored drive, and you are back in business. The cost is a little higher, but this is a nice luxury. The downside of this option is that if your server is unavailable, then you still cannot reach your data. Additionally, if the hard drive becomes corrupted it will also corrupt your backup. This is why we recommend mirrored drives as part of a larger solution that includes other backup systems.
Finally, there are mirrored servers. This entails the largest cost and is really not necessary, except for those web hosting companies that can tolerate no downtime at all. In this scenario, if the server itself dies you can have another server ready to take the load. In fact, if your company is large enough, you might already need this kind of solution for performance. Some websites require multiple servers to handle the performance, and it is load balanced across them. In this case, if a server dies the system still runs. This is the best solution but it is not always necessary. And, of course it is costly.
We recommend a weekly remote backup to provide you with a fail safe version. Even if the datacenter burns down, you will have a copy of your data. To this we would add either mirrored RAID drives or a second hard drive, depending on your hosting company’s needs. If you are more worried about recovery time from hard drive crashes, which is the most frequent hardware problem with dedicated servers, then go with the RAID drives. If you are more worried about the hard drive getting corrupted, go with the second hard drive.
We hope this article provides you with the information you need to adequately back up your dedicated server!
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