would it be a feasible idea to seperate the forums to a seperate server? that way if something else does fail, you can put up a notice on the forum, etc. i think it'd be a good idea to keep the communication venue on a seperate failsafe.
www.digitalpoint.com is on a different server, so that's already the case (a venue if something happens). Ultimately I just want to set everything up as clusters (web and database) for both fault tolerance and load balancing, which is what the new setup will be. All I can say is thank f'ing GOD it's after 5pm. between 11am and 3pm (peak times), the servers were text messaging my cell phone every 15 minutes because of the loads.... the current cell phone silence is golden.