[Marco van Herwaarden]

You have thought a lot about the technical maintenance of your board. I doubt however that this will be the biggest challenge for someone that only used forum software as an end-user. You will probably find that running the community as an Admin will be your biggest challenge.

How much technical knowledge is needed will depend on your own wishes. vBulletin already has a lot of default features. Most of these can be tuned to your liking by setting the options in the AdminCP (Administrator Control Panel). Besides the initial installation (limited knowledge needed), you don't need a lot of technical knowledge. If you want to add more features then the default vBulletin installation will give you, then you will need to install a modification, which might require a bit more knowledge depending on the modification. All modifications available at vBulletin.org are always free of costs.

You can add up to 3 additional email addresses for full support forum access to each customer account. This will give them licensed access to all official websites.

In the end it is the responsibility of the board admin to ensure a good backup is created. Very often the host will already backup files and databases on a regular basis, contact your host about this. vBulletin does not have a buildin reliable backup option. There are however many 3rd party utilities (mostly free) that can assist in creating a backup if this is not fully covered by your host.

Archiving used to be used to reduce storage and processing and would offer a leightweight version of an original. With the current processors and the low price of storage this has however became mostly obsolete. vBulletin only stores the full version of each page.