Well, in defense of the forum operators, while disk prices are getting lower, they still cost money. You also have to have space for the equipment, cooling to keep it running, backup for hardware failures, etc.. I would imagine a busy forum with lots of picture uploads would consume quite a bit of memory over the years. It might be interesting to ask how much disk space is allocated to storing the database here, I suspect it's pretty significant.
For my little computer empire here I have several NAS drives totaling around 5 terabytes, hard to imagine what OGR has for a database size. 
