A brand new Social Forum needs:

A web hosting plan + paying crazy money/per month

or

example:

IBM xSeries 335 Dual Intel Xeon 3.0GHz

4GB DDR ECC, 2x 36GB U320 10K RPM, RAID, 1U Rack Mount or similar...(one time payment)

Any ideas, suggestions or recommendations highly appreciated!

Thank you!

You forgot to add to option 2 a internet service plan that will allow 100's if not 1000's of connections at a time. This will cost more then plan 1 by itself.

Go with plan 1.