I started this thread and said I wouldn't come back to it after the reaction my comment caused. I apologise for any offence caused; I simply assumed this is a commercial site supported by popup adverts. In light of the subsequent posts I can't resist making some technical points:
(1) On the assumption that one is after a non-profit discussion site for pilots, I have not seen anything yet ruling out Usenet for this. Lots of people have impressions of Usenet and most of them are well out of date. Open Usenet is free, comes with massive bandwidth (courtesy of warez and porn, the typical ISP's usenet feed is 50-100GB per day), is mostly free of spam in non-binary groups, is anonymous (short of a court order or a police request served on the ISP, and even then there are ways to thwart that), is very fast (worldwide propagation takes minutes), and most importantly is fast to use. Every other www-based discussion system involves a lot of time getting in and out of threads. There really are many people who could make a useful contribution who don't have the time.
(2) The server described here costs relative peanuts, as would a much more powerful one. But is the server the bottleneck?
(3) Where is the real bottleneck? Is it the database transaction time on the server, or is it the bandwidth to the ISP, or is it something else?
Someone mentioned 400 people online, but most of those are silent. They are reading or (very occassionally) writing and all that is client side activity.
If the bandwidth to the ISP is the problem, one could do what most chatrooms have been doing for years: have a client side program (Windows executable for most people, Java for the remainder) which implements the "discussion group" user interface and the data flowing over the internet would be just the changes. I haven't been to a chatroom for years (and if I was I wouldn't own up to it nowadays
) but this is very old stuff, and the speed increase is dramatic. The decrease in per-GB billing cost would be equally dramatic. But someone would have to write the software. I was writing that kind of software to implement remote terminals over a 1200baud modem link, with simple RLL compression on the data for good measure, in the 1980s, on 4MHz Z80s