A lot of forums start out smart. This may be overstating the obvious, but when using forum software in general I feel most developments forget that. Every byte matters once your site becomes big. Maximizing your code performance to squeeze every last byte in the beginning will greatly matter once you are at that stage.
I obviously do not expect the development to cater to ever shared environment. That wouldn't be realistic. But it may be a good idea for them to run this on a few widely known and popular (large companies) shared host.
This is just a thought.
