Re: Oh It's so snappy!
If you need help with something like that, feel free to email/PM/AIM/etc me. I've been in that business for a long time.
95th percentile billing is the industry standard, and has been around since the early-1990s. The electric power industry has been doing it a lot longer. Say you own a factory and sometimes need to run some big machine that melts metal, so it takes a huge amount of power. The power company won't just give you a 26kV line and bill you by the kilowatt-hour like a resident or smaller business. Their capital investments, and substantial portions of their operating costs, are driven by peak demand, and the same is true of the Internet. So they measure usage by the largest customers, typically in 15 minute intervals, and bill them based on the highest 15 minute sample each month, or some lower percentile e.g. 95th, like is commonly done with telecommunications networks.
A forum really does not need all that, though. With more efficient software (FUDforum is pretty crappy from an internals point of view) the SR Forums, with its 600k posts, could easily run on one $1000 server. I do not know their bandwidth needs, but my guess is a few megabits/second (95th metered/billed.) The real cost of that bandwidth is < $10/Mbps these days, and around $1/Mbps for larger buyers (like my clients.)
This is why I was so irritated with that PSW guy, it really is pretty easy to host a silly forum. 
