Yuku free message boards

Good question. Over the years I've spoken to Bob regarding the forums and the platform and here's the answer (and a bit of history).

So about a 10 years ago or so, the decision was made to put the forums onto a platform called ezBoard. The decision was based on several factors:

1) support - There was a monthly fee (Bob, up until recently) has been paying the fee and in exchange, we were using a proven platform (ie less to worry about with regards to security, system maintenance, etc.)
2) redundancy - ezBoard (which was purchased by yuku) has backups, and a service engineering team to maintain their hundreds of servers. Less to worry about.
3) lack of support - back then, there were very very few people on the forums who were knowledgeable enough to maintain the software, let alone the hardware.

ezBoard was enveloped by Yuku, and all the above still holds true. In addition, should the decision be made to move to phpBB or vBulletin (Not a fan of phpbb personally. Far to many security holes for my tastes, nevermind that it's code base is ... not well thought out (I'm being kind here). vBulleting is a good choice though) we would still need a home. ie we would need a machine, with redundancy (with, preferably a CDN) to host it on, as well as guaranteed uptime.

Sure, we could host it on the same machines that the root site is on (ie where rasalvatore.com is served from), but the thought of running a php application on a windows server makes my skin crawl.

All that said, could I maintain it? Sure. My day job has been web application development for yahoo in the recent past, and I currently maintain 5k+ hosts that serve close to 2 million web sites. Maintaining one would be cake, but again, we'd have to find a good home. And at that point, we'd either need to go with a hosting company (which would limit our access to the server to usually just some silly control panel system (ie no ssh access to the linux/apache/mysql core) or someone would have to host it on their own machine (stability would then be an issue. Especially since we fend off attacks on a daily basis (syn flood, ddos, etc.)

Would I prefer to go a route where I have total control over the application? Of course! But there's a lot more to it than just switching over. (besides the fact that migrating 6k+ users and the ~370k posts would be a bloody nightmare)