[doug]

vBulletin is the best forum software available, and the PAFOA already bought the lifetime license. We will not be migrating to anything else. The cost of vB was never the issue anyway.
The PAFOA forums are getting pretty big, and there are other large websites on the servers which this forum coexists with. Sometimes there isn't enough CPU for everything that particular second.

At some point in the future, we will probably have an IT Fund raiser and buy the PAFOA some bitchin servers of it's own to dedicate to the task of running these forums.
We're seeing 40-50 new registrations a day, most of which post. Eventually it's going to get crazy insane, and we need to be ready for the reality of a few hundred thousand members on these boards in a couple years. The thought of that on my personal web servers makes me cringe.

Sites like THR which have 10x the traffic we do have STRIPPED down vBulletin installations. No rep, no stats, no fancy urls, no image hosting, no flashchat... minimal.
As we continue to grow, we very well may forced into similar compromises as we balance cool features against laggy load times. We've shut a few things off temporarily to help during heavy load.

It's quite possible that we will roll out optional 'premium membership' subscriptions on the forums when we switch over to PAFOA owned dedicated servers. The boards will always remain open and free to use, but a paid membership would get you access to a VIP mini-forum area, and other cool stuff. This would help offset the bandwidth costs which PAFOA would begin to pay. Again, this would be optional and would probably come with a cool icon for your postbit. No idea on pricing, but it's won't be outrageous..

I'm glad to have helped start this board up with danp from the very beginning on my machines, and it's grown before my eyes into something that neither of us could have envisioned.

The reality is that we've created a monster, and it's going to outgrow my hosting capabilities at some point in the future. We need to be prepared BEFORE we get there.

Food for thought...