I'm not sure if I have the right area to ask this question or not, but being pretty green when it comes to technical knowledge about servers and webhosting, can anybody tell me what the terms "Hardware Raid" and "Redundancy" mean.

Hi Mark,

take a quick read of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID


Dave

G'day Mark,
Redundancy is used in relation to a few things in hosting but generally means something similar in each case.

With hard discs, if one fails there will be one or more that have the same data and all your sites will keep working. You may want to look up hot swap while your in the wikie.

Same with bandwidth, if one supplier goes off-line there will be one or more running in parallel to keep all the sites on-line.

Some hosts have redundant servers, switches, routers, etc, etc.

That way, you can give your customers rock solid uptime. Unless the data centres sub-station blows up. As happened in the USoA recently. Bad work and/or design I reckon.

Cheers,

Mike

Thanks guys. I suppose that if I don't ask, I'll never know. I feel a bit silly, but then again, I run a forum for a hobby pursuit and we encourage people to ask "dumb" questions - in fact, we view it very dimly if somebody tries to take the p**s out a newb. I get good answers here - get ready for more questions.

Cheers