RAID Worth It?

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.

 

 

 

 

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