Except when you have to factor in all the plane flights to replace broken HDD. And the risk of not making it in time for when it breaks.

Most colo facilities let you buy hands on time through their techs or include a small amount per month for things like hard drive/ram swaps.

Yeah, I don't think I'd go with less than RAID-6 (or full system redundancy plus 1 drive redundancy in each). Rebuilds just take too long, even with an in-chassis spare on RAID5.

Unfortunately Areca is really the only controller I've found which is well supported and does RAID6 fast.

would those be managed at that price? because it's a hell of a lot more expensive when you factor in the cost of devops to make sure it stays working and fails over properly.

Poor inherited architecture, working to scale out greatnonprofits.org horizontally but it will be a while before we get there.

  I have nothing against colo but I don't really have time to run around the country checking on servers.