Total Hosting Newbie - Please Help!
 

Hello!

I'm looking into purchasing a vBulletin license to run a small online roleplaying community and I'm at a bit of a loss about how to get started. I've been on the user and moderator side of things before and I really liked using vBulletin, but I don't have any experience starting my own website. I realize the first thing that I need to do is figure out the hosting situation, which is why I've come to this forum for some friendly advice.

Our community will be very small, no more than 20 users online at a time (not counting guests and wandering search engines), and I expect we'll only manage half of that consistently. Will a forum that small work well on shared hosting? As I've browsed around this forum I've seen that many people use VPS hosting, but I don't really know enough about hosting to know if we'll need something like that. I'd also like to start up a small MediaWiki to keep track of content once the game is up and running, so I'd imagine that might factor into the hosting decision as well.

Since I'm on a budget, the current shared hosting promotions at FatCow and HostGator look really tempting, but I want to check and make sure that vBulletin will be compatible with those options. Sorry to be such a clueless newb... Can anyone help me figure out what will work best?