As a side note...

When I started my forum, I had a shared hosting account. There came a time when it became somewhat active and I started getting rather polite "nasty-grams" from my host informing me that the site was in violation of my TOS due to resource usage.

That is, they started out polite. However, within a short amount of time they become a tad bit more insistent and they started shutting off the site when loads hit some threshold.

That was when I went to a dedicated server.

I never had ads on my site prior to this, but had to do something to cover the cost of the server. So I created a Google AdSense account and within a very short time, my site was more than paying the bills.

The moral of this little story is that if your forums become active enough that you are getting grief from your host, it very well may be time to go to a dedicated server.

It kind of freaks me out that VaGunTrader has no ads. Dude! You are sitting on a freaking gold-mine. The ads do not have to be overly obtrusive and you will STILL rake in some serious coin.

Here's the rub...

If you go with a dedicated server... It's ALL you.

Meaning that you require a much larger skill set to manage your server than it takes to simply run a forum.

It's a question of how much do you know now and how much are you willing to learn. The learning curve can be steep. Still, it can be a fun and rewarding experience.

I love the fact that I can do any damn thing I want with my server and I can start and run as many sites as I please at no additional cost.

Just a thought. wink