Alrighty, just don't underestimate how pedantic I am
. This is no ordinary build of httrack, and I spent over a month perfecting the ripping process last year. For example, I made sure to rip all the forum index pages in a 5 minute window, then checked back on the site to ensure no topics fell through the cracks by a new thread being added to page 1 for example, before I'd retrieved page 64. I made sure every single page of every topic got scanned, and got scanned only once, and I wrote tools to verify the results. I renamed attachments, ripped all important external content (such as included css and embedded images), and spent hours browsing the backup with no internet connection to make sure it looked identical to the real site. I made sure you could view poll results, use the dynamic "arrows" to build valid page navigation links when browsing long topics/forums, and I even made sure the favicon is properly referenced on every page so that it appears for the complete site, even if you open it locally or don't host it at a root domain level. I had to make lots of fixes to the engine too, in order to make sure topics with unicode characters in the URL like
this one got mirrored properly, as well as fix a bunch of other issues. The list of rules is so long I couldn't pass it as command line arguments normally, as it blew the character limit, I had to launch the process through code to get the arguments in. Basically, I obsessed over it and spent far too long making sure it was just right, and I've been through that process again now, with improvements over last time. I'd strongly recommend you try out my rip (with your internet disconnected!) before you consider hosting anything. I think you'll find there's not much else to do than drop the files on a webhost and walk away.