[eoc_Jason]

One thing I liked about EV1 (now The Planet) is there is no long-term commitment and the prices are great.

I have to agree with stopping the http service while doing the backup, or at least switching to another web server or something smaller (something that won't access the DB every connection) if you don't want your users to freak.

Be aware that eventually even a master / slave setup will not be all that optimal for searching. It alievates the table locking issues but doesn't make searching any faster, and the more posts you have the slower searching will be. The best solution I found for searching was to switch to sphinx... the best change I ever made.

You can try doing your backup at a different time. If you use MRTG to graph other stuff you can graph your forum users, then at the lowest usage point is the time to do your backups. I still have a lot of people on @ 2am... but between 4am-6am there are a lot less.