About the forums?

[Infracaninophile]

As someone with a professional interest in running forums sites on FreeBSD,
I'd love for the site admins to tell us some more about the hardware this
site is running on, who is hosting it, how it's paid for (vBulletin is not
free software) and that sort of thing. Judging by the time zone, it's
physically located somewhere in Europe.

[wabbit]

As Netcraft (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=forums.freebsd.org) shows, it's probably hosted by the Internet Systems Consortium.

However, I'm quite curious myself about the database in use (MySQL or PostgreSQL), and the hardware.

[vermaden]

I am curious why choose Apache while there are much faster alternatives like nginx and cherokee.

[brd@]

The machine is generously hosted by the Internet Systems Consortium https://www.isc.org/. The hardware of the machine is.. well not wanting to release too much info, I'll say p3 class. So nothing too fancy, but we can upgrade the machine if we need to. We use the vBulletin software because it has a better security record than the others and seems to have the most features. The Database is MySQL (personally, I'd rather have PostgreSQL) because that is the only one that vBulletin supports. We choose Apache because it is the best know to the admins running the site.