We use an ISP in the U.S. to host PPRuNe as historically bandwidth has been a lot cheaper in the U.S. Recently bandwidth has been coming down in price in the UK and we are currently rethinking this.
We have our own (leased) server. It's a twin-pentium machine with 512Mb RAM, 9Gb of disk and it runs a unix-based O/S. We use the Zeus webserver as it's the fastest around, is relatively easy to administer, support from Zeus is first-rate and it's highly secure.
If/when we move the website to the UK we'll have to buy our own server as very few UK ISPs actually have available anything that is powerful enough. ISPs require the hardware to be rackmounted so our new server will be expensive.
Currently we use somewhere between 4 and 5Gb of disk space. When we do software upgrades we do an on-disk backup before starting the work so that if things go wrong we can very quickly recover, hence I always make sure we have at least 3Gb free.
UltimateBB was cheap when PPRuNe started, it's been relatively reliable, is fairly easy to modify/fix but it isn't very efficient.
---Mik
[ 21 November 2001: Message edited by: PPRuNe Dispatcher ]