PhpBB Troubleshooting

From DreamHost

The usual cause for a phpBB forum to get out of hand is spammers or hackers becoming a problem on the board. If you've already upgraded phpBB to the latest version and are still having a problem, the article at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=246600 should help you get that problem under control.

If your phpBB forum is very popular and busy, you can try the suggestions at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=135383 to optimize your phpBB install. Other posts on the phpBB forum suggest that turning off auto-pruning may help. If you have avatar or image resizing enabled, try turning that off for a few days to see if that helps.

You also may wish to check your webserver access logs for search engine robots being very aggressive with indexing your site. You can block them by constructing a robots.txt file.

If none of these options work, it could be that you have made a very popular forum that has outgrown shared web hosting. You may wish to considered a dedicated hosting plan. Ours start at only $99 per month if you pre-pay for a year.