Hey, MB and Midnite, while we're on the subject, can you take us down memory lane for a minute? What was that original host for our beloved board long, long ago, before the turn-of-the-millenium? I can still remember what it looked like.
We've always used the same basic software for the forum. Originally it was written in the Perl computer language and that used up a huge amount of memory, which is why during the first year of the forum we kept getting shut down so often. But thankfully the software developers switched to PHP in 2003 and there is nowhere near the memory overhead with it that Perl had.
But so far as hosts, companies that store our software on their servers, goes, we've had many, some a lot better than others. I can't even remember the names of any of our previous hosts, probably because I love our current host so much. For the most part (apart from that 2017 incident) we hit the jackpot when we moved the forum to their services.
As for the various looks the forum has had through the years, those were all of my design, also some better than others. But it was a big learning curve when the forum first started because I was learning things by the seat of my pants, mostly because I had to learn the Perl language because I'd never worked with it before (though thankfully it's similar to languages I had used). I'd created other Web sites previous to the forum, but nothing as complicated as the forum is. And interestingly enough the forum's look will be evolving again before too long because the software developers have released a perfected 2.1 version of their software but I just haven't gotten the time to upgrade the forum to it. Once I do, we'll have a new look. Though how different a look will depend on how differently the upgraded software works...
