Allrightythen.

After being on a VPS for the past 2 years, I'm having to upgrade to a dedicated box.

Problem (other than tripling my costs): I don't know dick about server admin. Being a web designer, I really don't want to know anything about server admin.

So I'm availing myself of the level 3 management to cover all bases. So I get port monitoring and service monitoring and 2 hours of sys admin time a month. Hurray!

Problem: I have no [CENSORED] clue what to ask for. What ports to monitor, what services to monitor, what to request for in the sys admin time other than "Duh. Me want go faster."

Also, the box I'm getting has dual drives. Problem: I can't afford the $35 extra per month for the raid card.... so what do I do with the second drive?

(1) On-server backups. Instead of backing up to the remote FTP space all the time, do nightly backups to the second drive and weekly or monthly to the FTP space. Not really sure what that would gain me, as I'm already doing nightly incremental backups to the remote FTP space.

(2) Optimization? Not knowing squat about servers, is there a certain way to configure certain volumes on different physical devices that would result in better performance? Best analogy is on a Windoze box you can put the OS on one hard drive and the data on a second drive for better performance... any such animal?

Obviously I have no clue what I'm doing, so any suggestions would be appreciated...