I am in big need of advice please and hope I have placed this in the right forum.

Many years ago I purchased a UBB classic and I couldn’t be happier and I have stayed pat with version 5.45c since then. And, while I have been tempted by the wonderful upgrades that have been developed I have always believed in not fixing something that’s not broke. Honestly, in all the years I have not had any problems. Being a senior citizen change doesn’t come quickly, but now I find it necessary to finally upgrade and this has created some concerns that I hope someone can help me with.

First, I very much want to have my forums display the views feature. My web site Allen Online (Allen, Texas) is a community web site and I sell local advertising on it. My forums called Allen Talk are my most popular feature. Since I feel that the views feature as compared to the replies feature will do a better job in relating the forum popularity to potential advertisers I have decided to switch to UBB Threads because I understand the feature is not offered in Classic. I think this part is the right thing for me to do and please correct me if I am wrong. But this brings me to my next concern. Presently I seem to be chewing up bandwidth as activity has increased on my web site.

My forums currently have 1,200 members and there have been about 10,000 replies the last year. My stats are showing about 23,000 hits to my homepage each month and they also show that the forums are the most accessed pages by far. I use a Verio as my hosting service and I have already used 33% of my monthly allotment of bandwidth and the month is only about 1/3 over. I am allotted 10 GB and concerned that I am headed toward overage fees. Therefore, I would like to get your feedback about which hosting service is the best for me to use.

Presently, I spend $49.95 per month for Verio, but please keep in mind that in 5 years my web site has very rarely been down and reliability is paramount for me. I really like Infopop and the free UBBx but the bandwidth fees would appear to kill me and would like to get a hosting service that gives so much initial bandwidth that I don’t have to think about it again. I have looked at web hosting reviews and seen 2 hosts that offer a lot of bandwidth with their basic plans. They are Globat $7.50 per month with 50 GB bandwidth and Infinology basically with the same. I have also looked at Yahoo business web hosting but they have received many bad reviews. Please understand these low fees are not the appealing factor for me, the large bandwidth allotment is. What I need is the same reliability I had with Verio, and a lot of increased bandwidth. I will also have someone install and transfer my forums for me. I really need ease of operation and like to leave the technical aspects to experts like you folks.

Please help me with some recommendations. They will be greatly appreciated.

My web site is www.allenonline.com
My forums are www.allenonline.com/cgi-local/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro

Thank you.

I like the name

http://www.infopop.com/webhosting
http://www.vertexhost.com
http://www.ubbhosters.com

All 3 provide topnotch value if you take into account features, reliability, performance, and service. I'd recommend infopop since I know the guy running it, the other 2 do an excellent job too

and I thought the $100 a month I paid was a lot

Keep in mind that our dedicated servers are managed by us (i.e. we do all the admin work to keep the box up and running), and are designed to host UBB.x You can pull many millions of UBB.x pageviews from a Rainier box.

We have a few customers that need the clustered machines to safely handle the traffic that their boards pull...

si, there's some big customers there