I have a web server and a separate DB server. The web server is also a write-only slave to the DB server. Since it's write only and vBulletin does far more reads than writes the extra load to run this slave is minimal. I've got 750,000 posts and 6,000 unique visitors a day.
I then backup the slave, using mysqldump in a cron job, during an offpeak time. Zero impact to users.
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