Sorry But Image Upload For This Forum Is A Nightmare

We've moved twice already, and I don't plan on it again. The database alone now exceeds 20GB in size. There are 450GB of just images.

We were on shared hosting with GoDaddy when we first launched, at 6.99/month. Outgrew that in 18 months.

We then moved to a server owned by one of the forum developers. It was so-so; he had a full-time job, so support was spotty. That was around $200/month. He passed away in 2021, and we almost completely lost everything. Rackspace wouldn't even acknowledge anyone but him; they wouldn't even talk to his wife. Our friend Rui stayed up all night babysitting the download of our database before they shut the server down, and he had to work the next day. It took about 9 hours. We we so close to not being here anymore. If it had taken a few more days for us to find out he passed, we wouldn't be here.

I then decided not to depend on anyone else anymore. We now have our own dedicated server at Liquidweb, $360/month. Terrific support, answers within 10 minutes. Of course, that doesn't include things like Cloudflare and Cleantalk to keep the douchenozzles away, domain registrations, email, etc.

This software has so many modifications now, I'll never give it up. I've learned how to do a lot of things myself. If we switched to one of the other common boards, I'd have to learn PHP from scratch and probably pay someone to do a lot of the mods again that are over my head.