LOL... that is pretty funny ISH. I have a pretty twisted sense of humour, along with being a dry sarcastic prick at the same time. Yes, a little dramatic though for my intent of the ads here, though I will say this... in only 36hrs they have been online, they work and the forum is beginning to get some support to aid its growth. If I wanted to make money, I could have years ago from this, but this is about just keeping it running, without anyone profiteering, but covering the costs as this place continues to grow.
Ramblings....
The problem with server loads is that you can't compare any two forums, because it all depends on what functions you have turned on and how the forum is being used. If you have a forum that is heavily image or video based, then that servers load will be much more drastic for only the smallest of forums. If you have a forum that isn't heavily image or video based, though you have every feature the software has turned on, then a forum with 25,000 posts may require a dedicated server to run it, due to nothing more than the person is trying to deliver every feature known to man, which has intensive side effects to a server CPU.
Many people think starting a forum is a harmless activity, they usually begin with a free PHPBB version on a $100 per annum hosting account. There software gets hacked automatically over and over, their first realisation is often that the free software in conjunction with shared hosting is pretty destructive. So they outlay a cost for the more secure commercial software, being vBulletin or IPB. Both being the major leaders in forum software and around the same price, $250 per license period / release. They drop this software onto their shared hosting environment and then suddenly their host is cancelling their account, because the software is far more server intensive than the freeware software. Then they start with a $20 a month hosting account on a server that can handle the basic software application. As the forum grows to 10,000 posts, suddenly the host is telling them they need to upgrade, as its now becoming too server intensive. So now the costs begin to spiral. Some people pay hundreds per month for tiny forums because they don't understand hosting... so then they begin, they get better deals with VPS or dedicated solutions and begin learning the hosting world. This alone can take decades of experience to trial and error host providers in order to find the true leaders within the industry.
When you create a hit forum, which is rare, that suddenly has millions of posts in a very short time, you use ads and other means to cover the $1000 + monthly cost to host the site, usually all oblivious to the members themselves. A site called Big Boards measures the larger forums in the world, being you must have 500,000 posts to make the list. Currently they only have around 2,500 or so of them (without looking on the site). Usually if you happen to create something that large, you bring in investors, etc, real quick, and instead buy your own high end servers for an initial cost and the co-locate them within a server farm at a more reasonable cost of around $100 per server. This is the point where you have master and slave servers, dedicated storage servers, database servers, file servers, backup servers, etc... all for one website.
Me personally, I am glad that this forum only grows progressively in an amount I can atleast plan for with lots of foresight.
