Serious answer:
All the websites you mentioned in your OP serve primarily static content (with the exception of maybe Fark); that is, they’re regular HTML pages. It’s much easier for a machine to serve 1000 static-HTML pages, where it just spits up the content on the screen and it’s the same for everyone. Notice that there isn’t really a problem accessing the daily columns or main pages of the site; the message boards are the slow part. My website hosting is easily affordable even though I get tons of traffic precisely because I’m just offering some images and static content. The computer doesn’t need to generate a unique page and assemble it for each user and every page.
Message boards and dynamic content are waaaay more work for a server than static HTML. To open a SDMB thread, the computer has to figure out who is logged in, figure out if you decided to view sigs or not, figure out if it needs to edit out posts for anyone you might have on Ignore, format all the messages every time the thread is opened, etc. Every time you view a forum it moves the newest thread to the top and readjusts the post count, views, etc. Essentially, each time you view the SDMB, the server is generating every page on demand for you. That’s so much different from me getting in my text editor, writing up some HTML, and you looking at it. In that case, the browser says “give me this HTML file,” it gives it, and your browser renders it. It stays the same each time. That’s what Memepool and Cruel are – Rogers Cadenhead and the Memepool editors are posting those links manually, each day, for you to view. The computer isn’t doing the work, the humans are.
Cookies, sigs, e-mail notification, special preferences for each poster, smilies, VBCodes, parsed URLs, and all of things which are just the nature of the content are what’s making this site slow. It would be impossible for a human to ever do what the computer is doing to run this message board – by its very nature, it needs to be automated – bit it is quite a list of complicated tasks going on at one time and that naturally takes up a lot of processing power.
I post quite a bit in the middle of the night, and the board is much faster, because there are less people using up the site resources. It’s more processing power than bandwidth issues (though with more processing to do back and forth between your machine and the server, and unique pages generated you will eat up more bandwidth). During the day, around lunchtime, most of the pages I try to view will time out because everyone is trying to access the SDMB from work.
Now, there’s your reason why Rogers can offer Cruel fast for free, but you have to wait for the SDMB. As for why they don’t have a better, more capable server, I just have to say that you get what you pay for.
I guess if and/or when they decide to find a way for the users to pay for an upgrade, you’ll have the option of what you’ve got now or something better.