What IF my server crashes? Really it's WHEN it crashes!

People always ask "What if my server crashes?" but really the question is "When my server crashes, then what?"

Hands-on Web Hosting has been in the business long enough to know that the possibiliy of a server crashing and being unrecoverable is very much a reality.  Granted, today, there are less severs failing, however with cheaper hardware comes shorter lifetimes for the equipment and ultimately will lead to a failure.

Backups; a real concern, all servers at some point will fail. This is a guarantee. Whether it's 1 year or 7 years, unless there's a disaster recovery plan in place, you can find yourself in a lot of hot water.

The RAID option is a good option as it allows the possibility of a hard drive failing, but still running (as it has two drives). Also, RAID allows a user to read from BOTH drives - delivering faster results. So if one drive is busy writing data, it will read from the other quicker. No need from stripping for that situation either.

NAS backup and DiskSync are other ideal methods of backup.

Of the two, the DiskSync is usually faster, and can restore a failed system in minutes rater than hours. The NAS backup is no differnet than a 3rd harddrive stored elsewhere and can be accessed via the server. DiskSync allows for incrimental backups without the need to add any additional software to the server - it all happens in the background and is usually faster.