Especially interested in responses from those who have over 1000 member boards.
But, any advice would be appreciated in this area. Looking like we may need affordable dedicated or cloud hosting somewhere. Ideas, anyone?
If your board is that active, then I would definitely go with a dedicated server. You will quickly find that most data centers don’t really provide much in the form of supporting the server, so you need to learn a bit yourself, or hire a good sysadmin.
As to where to host, well for me I chose the best data center I could find within driving distance. I personally got really lucky and found a new company opening within my city. I was the 3rd customer they had which was cool as I had virtually unlimited bandwidth on the rack.
Now they are at full capacity and continue to grow. I can say that I have not had a single second of downtime due to the datacenter, not one second! They have redundancy in every area one could conceive of, so even when they are doing major work, everything is on backups.
The pricing is ‘decent’, but I would trade saving a few dollars a month for the rock solid support that I receive from them. You will quickly find that the cost is not the biggest factor in choosing a good home for your site.
If it matters, I use http://www.netriver.net
*you will not find any pricing on the site. Everything is custom. After all, this ain’t crappy godaddy hosting
well, I am using hostgator, so far had no problems. It’s quite cheap, you can host your forum for few $.
Thanks for the responses.
How many members & current posts do you have, Kasos aparatai?
If your website is really utilizing 150GB’s of bandwidth per month, moving to another shared hosting provider, such as HostGator, unless to a dedicated, won’t do much good.
1). What are you currently hosting your website on and with who?
2). If you’re on a VPS or Dedicated Server:
– – 2a). What are the specs? (i.e. CPU, RAM, etc)
– – 2b). Have you attempted to optimize Apache/MySQL?
– – 2c). Are you running any sort of caching plugin or OP-Code Cache (i.e. APC, xCache, etc)?
The more details you can provide the better 
.
As a non-profit I’d also suggest checking with both your members and area businesses. It’s possible you could get a deal with a local company that hosts their own stuff. Also have a chat with http://npwebhosting.com which is a smaller but generally well reviewed company geared at non-profits and ask them what they’d recommend based on your traffic and current specs. You should do that with a few to compare and any company really to get a feel for them before signing up.
