Advice / Feedback wanted from experienced admins

Hello everyone. I am planning to start a forum. Would love to hear some advices / feedback from some experienced admins out there. Greatly appreciated.

The planned forum:
Cooking / food forum: 2 Asian food / cuisine.

Language: English mainly, possibly adding their respective language to some ingredients, name of the dish, some special terms, methods, etc...

Audience: 1. those 2 asian nationalities who could read / write english 2. any other nationalities with english reading / writing abilities that are also interested in these 2 asian style food



Questions:


Hosting:
* Local vs Overseas. If I use hosting companies in those 2 asian countries, is it more advantageous to better reach out to them or not really?

* What else different for hosting locally vs overseas beside the potential overseas calling fees if required to call them up.


Domain name:
.com vs using the local extensions, e.g. .com.au, .uk, does it help to get to my targeted audience?


Marketing:
* How or any tools available that I could check other similar related sites traffics, demographics, etc..?




Softwares:

I have narrowed down to 3 softwares to choose from: phpBB, ipboard, vbulletin:

* Are paid ones really better in terms of security, smoothness of loading the site and database, handling big communities, more stable?

* Would paid ones less likely to run into technical problems?

* How much is ipboard and vBulletin in general?

* I am commited keep building the forum for the long term, is it better to go for paid from the start? Is it much hassle / trouble and possible many errors if later decided to port phpBB to the paid ones?

* What are other advantages or disdvantages of using paid ones vs phpBB that I might not thought of but should consider?

* I will have a very limited time and tight work schedule, does it help if I choose a paid software or its really the same?




Forum Design:

lets say my design to would look like this: One More Thing

* How customisable are those paid forum softwares, the ones I have seen out there, mostly are very similar to the original mother design. If it's highly customisable, does knowing CSS enough?




Contents: Being ethical, respectful and doing the right thing:

With recipes, people are either inspired by either their friends / families passed on to them or from experience or from books and often from the internet: a blog / forum.

* Now if I got inspired by a recipe from a blog or forum, tried it and post and discuss it on my own forum, but reference it in a link. Is this stealing?

* If so, what's an appropriate way of doing it? What about if say I research more similar recipes, combined them, modify them, then use it and post on my forum, (referencing them). Is this appropriate or still stealing?



Once again, thank you very much in advance.

 

There are still people out there that don't realize there are extensions besides '.com'. Admittedly, most of them encountered the Internet in adulthood. Since you are doing a food-based site, I'd suggest .com simply because you are not appealing to young or tech savvy users.

 

If you've seen the pathetic reviews vBulletin are getting (which is understandable), you'll stay well-away from it.

IMO, the two leaders are definitely IP.board and XenForo. I've just bought my IPB license, am impatiently awaiting the release of 3.2. If they nail this version (which I have high expectations for), then I shall stay. If not will sell/trade and take a much deeper look into XenForo, they're impressing me, but IP.board really seem keen on getting their act together.

Paid ones are much better as they offer full technical support, which WILL come in handy. Also, ticket systems.

I'd never use anything-other than a .com. May settle for an extremely decent .net, but would always stick to .com.

Forums are a strain on hosting, shared hosting will be stable for the first few months, but as soon as the forum starts to mature; you'll have to move to a VPS and if growth continues you'll certainly have to move to a dedicated. No-one enjoys page-loads.

Hope my advice has helped.