well, besides the 5-10 second connection times, I'll leave the hosting alone (since its what I do, I am admittedly a bit biased)
As for load balancing...
We currently have a few clients running busy forum software. The easiest approach we found so far is to have multiple front ends running the software and bouncing users between each frontend machine with simple round robin dns setup.
Then, having a master mysql server handling some of the db reads and all of the writes, and then having several mysql slaves, handling only reads and synching to the master...
Very simple and effective. Actual clustering gets a bit tricky.
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