In the beginning...
In March 2008, following our AGM, John Elliott and I started a search for a replacement for the Springfield Striders Running Club's host at that time, Demon Internet. Our existing virtual server was proving far too small even for our basic needs plus a very small bulletin board, let alone advanced blogging, streaming and modern bulletin boards. Even a basic installation of phpBB, a standard board tool, would have exceeded the total 50MB available on their virtual server.
Existing hosting solutions boiled down to either shared hosting, or a virtual solution. There was no custom scalability, so obtaining the few Gigabytes required for a fully-featured website plus streaming meant that lots of un-needed extra bandwidth had to be purchased; in most cases running and athletics clubs will have only one to three hundred members, of which maybe half access the club's webpages regularly. Adding ten page impressions of a bulletin board per user gives a total of only two to three thousand 'hits' on the site per day. By contrast, archives particulary of photographic material require Gigabytes of storage space, and as this is archive and historical material cannot be obsoleted and deleted.