At the beginning

[freefallu]

Hi,

I got myself Vb and opened my first forum ten days ago. I have got myself to100 subscriptions and climbing. I only did it to keep up with a competitor but my eyes are opened and working on the board has become a bit of an obsession. I run it on a windows server at our office and realise this is not the wisest. I own a PR7 on target domain that will hit the headlines if I put the forum over there for SE traffic. I have a number of sites and can justify colo ( Ok i want to cos Im a geek ). So heres the rub...

I use windows 2003 because its pretty much all i know. Is there a big difference and a tangible return in performance if I learn to run it on Linux ( which I have never used ) and something like apache. Im concenred with speed yes, but stability and security more if I do as planned manage to ramp the userbase.

My plan is to put the forum in the public eye by allowing people put video in the photopost section of the site. I think this will be big. The main rival has 30,000 active users but is not interested in developing his site and turns it off every so often as the bandwith gets expensive ( i can justify it on adds and traffic to my main site which is for my own real life business ).

Also i have a choice in terms of Dual core or dual processors on the 1U , any tips ? I am going to go with RAID 1 for security on two SCSI HDS at 10K budget ) is this ok inyho for forum use which i guess is a lot of small read writes. 2GB ram should do it i think.


Lastly, i would like to outsource some of the work for integrating VB and photopost and customizing photopost to my neeeds. Should i do that here or on somewhere like Elance?

Lots of questions , so if this reads really badly thanks for getting this far.

David