Even though there's some "strain" in the conversation I find it very insightful :)

I believe that Dolphin is a complex piece of software (hosting-wise)... ffmpeg being the major contributor to this, but anyway, it can run on a properly configured shared hosting for a small site. It's only natural that you need a ded-box for a site with many members uploading/converting/sharing media, communicating online, streaming video, listening music online, searching, etc. Dolphin 7 also comes with see more a load of ajax queries, which add to the whole thing. We're doing a lot of performance testing and improvements now, but when you think about WHAT people are doing on the Dolphin site, you'd expect increase spending on hosting.

Community and fraudsters... well, I, for one, really love this community and believe it's only the current lack of proper moderation tools and structure flaws that bring problems. We will overcome it. We have a right direction now - once BoonEx is switched to Dolphin 7 we'd have only one product to work on and results will spread to both directions. This community has a lot of potential, it will grow and it will only get better.

Support... somehow I have to say "sorry" for this for 8 years already, and finally, in a few months it's going to end, once and for all.

Thank you DeeEmm. Looking forward to seeing you around for a lot longer.