i've just finished university with a degree in business specializing in marketing. i've known how powerful the internet is for a while now so i have gone out of my way to learn about programming and SEO. i've come up with a great business plan and marketing strategy that will hopefully create a really really big awesome highly customized forum. problem is i don;t know a lot about the type of stuff that goes on at the planet. my questions are.....

what type of forum should i go with? i really like phpBB. how bad of a choice is that? i need to customize the profiles with a lot of added info about each user. of course database optimization is the highest priority. i'm open to looking at other forum types. any ideas?

what type of server should i go with assuming that all i am going to run is a very big very active forum and joomla?

is it very hard to switch to a different server set up if things aren't working out? does the planet make it difficult?

thanks for any help.

The planet doesn't make it particularly easy (as a mom and pop ISP might do, by migrating your data for you for example or doing a complicated in-box hardware swap on your schedule.) But they don't make it difficult at all either as the ordering and provisioning process is pretty smooth.

It also has to do with how big you mean when you say big.

If your forum runs on one small or medium server and you then need to upgrade to a large or monster server, that's pretty easy. You order the new server, overlap them a month, configure the new server as you like, test, test, test, move the database over, then repoint the dns to the new server and drop the old server when you're confident everything is working 100% properly on the new server under real-world load.

If however you mean "really big" as in a cluster of servers, things can get more complicated and require a lot more planning to get setup for your specific needs... e.g. a private rack, etc.