Hi
'vspec',
The forums are doing well, very well actually. For the time they have been running, the userbase is pretty solid, and there is a good amount of information found here. The site is also climbing the ranks in google, yahoo, and to a lesser extent bing.
The site is still brand new. I would not consider it established at least until the 12 month mark. Now, to your question about the hosting.
Having the site hosted in Australia would bump up the ranking results a lot. The reason I have not done this is because hosting in Australia costs a lot of money. For a normal site, shared hosting would be fine (hosted on a server with other hosting clients), and would not be expensive at all. However, this site is sitting on a dedicated server (the hosting server does not have other sites hosted on it that I do not own / know about), it has 10 cpu's running powering it, and I can change the hardware as I see fit. The bandwidth is also hooked up to a 100mbps unmetered line, which means it can push around 15TB of data transfer each month.
To get the server with the exact same specs, and the same bandwidth in Australia, it will cost roughly 50 times as much, and the server as it is, is not cheap. My income, along with all of my friends income each month will not be able to pay for the server.
So by now I am guessing you have the question of why a small forum needs its own server, and here is where the fun begins.
This site is currently capable of a tiny part of what is to come. As it stands, it is just forums. There is a lot more sections coming which I will reveal at a later date.
These sections will be hardware intensive, and some of them will be bandwidth intensive. Users will have a one stop website for all their hobby needs. From trading in a market, to sourcing information, to being able to setup webcams of their tank and have it stream live to this site for other users to enjoy.
Networking is also a major factor, and you will see more and more sites on the internet being sponsored, or powered by The Reefuge. I am in two minds about one feature that I would like to see happen, and that is an irc network made for aquarium sites around the world. I am not sure if I will go through with this, but I am looking into it.
At some point, I will also like to be able to hook into LFS websites, so updates and specials are shown to all users live.
There are a lot more things, but I will keep them a secret for now.
I hope this helps!
Thanks.
