[ALanJay]

From the various comments on this forum and elsewhere the general view seems to be that once you get to a certain size splitting the system between mySQL server and web server seems to be a good policy.

Also there seems to be a view that Unix (FreeBSD/Linux etc) provides a very stable high performace platform for vBulletin.

At some point you are going to have to make that move if you belive the site will grow quickly then you probably want to ensure that your hardware will be usable in the future.

We have a very big site (8 front end HTML servers against a mySQL cluster) with our images offloaded to a separate server (well pair of them), but what we have learnt is that memory and disk performance is important.

The last batch of HTML servers we got were dual Opteron / 8Gb RAM with SCSI 320 / 15k hard disks.

This might be more than you need but the big problem you will have is that the first split between the front end HTML and the back end mySQL is easy as is spliting off the images. When you move to multipl front ends things will get more complicated so you want to put off that day until the last minute.

Today you can get quite reasonably priced high preformance servers so if you can afford go for a reasonable compromise. One thing to check is that the operating system you are using can actually use all the memory that the machine might have. Nothing more annoying that ending up with a machine and realising that the OS only can access part of the physical memory

Good luck.