I somewhat disagree with what you have said, there is no point going out and getting a dedicated server or even a VPS when starting out. Of course as the forum grows one should upgrade incrementally. But till you get some serious traffic, a shared hosting account is more than enough. My forum doesn’t really has that much traffic yet, however what ever traffic that does comes in gets efficiently served by my shared hosting account.

Bottom line is switching hosts isn’t that hard and one can easily do it during the lean period i.e. weekend nights without majority of users knowing about it and loosing any data. So why pay for resources you wont be consuming for sometime to come?

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | Free Travel Directory

Moreover, most judge overhead by a count of the queries a hack may do. They see one and think, no problem.

They see 2 or three and the hack must suck. But it's not that simple. You have to know what the query does and how often.

I can show you 5 queries in a row that out perform one query.

I don't disagree. But in the context of this discussion, we are already past that point.

But the fact still remains. a 5$ or 8$ host is usually crap. They say unlimited and that is the first clue it's crap. They are usually some guy with a reseller account on an already oversold server.

Lesson: Choose wisely.

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vBPicGallery - The photo gallery for vBulletin forums.
Talk to bikers around the world about motorcycles.

Obviously if some one is offering you unlimited or crazy amount of bandwidth and space for 5-8 dollars a month, they are promising you some thing that they cannot deliver and are thus overselling like crazy.

Having said that, there are few good hosts out there, who can offer you decent hosting for 5-8 bucks a month, of course they won't be able to promise you huge amount of space and bandwidth and of course you would still have to move your sites once you start receiving decent amount of regular traffic.

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | Free Travel Directory

I would say that qualifies your point. But unfortunately, and I can say this from both experience and inexperience, it's just hard to tell. Referrals are useless for the most part. Most are affiliate referrals with an agenda.

It's not impossible, it's just a jungle out there to navigate.

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vBPicGallery - The photo gallery for vBulletin forums.
Talk to bikers around the world about motorcycles.

Good lesson, always research your host before doing business with them.

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Xbox Nation