[vitriol83]

interesting article. a few more points which may be of interest

- in addition to raid it's worth having automated off-site backup. the best solution i could find is duplicity as its encrypted and supports a bunch of backends.

- freebsd supports full disk encryption using geli. with some work its possible to make it boot (only) from a usb key, so some protection if the server is stolen. I believe newer versions of Intel Atom support hardware AES acceleration, so this isn't a large overhead.

- if the memory requirements of ZFS are too large (which to be honest for a soho application they are!), then you can use UFS together with freebsd software raid1 (gmirror)