I still pay for it, but the cost has been substantially reduced these days. I buy 'blocks' of hosting out of the States
With each block I can host 16 dedicated sites (more if the customer is happy to use a shared IP, ie a low volume site.)
Plus with added hosting competition is the States, the prices have actually come down by almost half in the 7 years I've been hosting it.
I think I now pay about $200 a year. I don't mind paying at all, it's very much covered by my other paying customers
Whilst I've got the forum running like a well oiled machine, since moving off the horrible & no longer supported phpnuke, the
pure phpbb has a been a breeze to administer. Having said that, I'm sure the site could use improvements. We really neeed
a cover page lol.... and a skin to the downloads section amongst other things.