The future of the forum:

[Slaninar]

• Our local motorcycling forum was preserved by removing the localy hosted pictures. A drastic cut, but with zero budget, it was an option.
  
• I use & recommend Porkbun for domain registration without spending more than necessary (if I got it right, renewal for a co.uk domain is around $6 per year there). https://io.bikegremlin.com/15824/porkbun-review/
  
• For hosting, how much storage space are we talking about?
  
• Google AdSense can be used to cover the costs by adding some adverts.Not ideal, but it works more reliably than relying on donations.
  

• Too drastic imho, regarding images, removing duplicates should help.
  
• Will keep this in mind.
  
• atm 50gb, but a lot of that is backups and the old forum. So I need to make local backups before attempting to nuke anything.
  
• I would rather stab myself with a fork, I despise google and ads in general.
  

Here are some practical ideas, numbered for easier discussion:

1) Removing images
Digression part
I did it as a radical ("Solomon's") solution for hosting our forum for undetermined_time_in_the_future at my own cost with zero ads or member funding.
In hindsight, I am not 100% sure if it was the right (or the wrong, for that matter) call.
Forum was in a technical mess at the time, so it was not easy to try and just compress/"optimize" images or see to remove the less important ones (though I'm not sure I could make the call which member galleries are worth, and which aren't worth keeping, with countless inactive members etc.).

Back to the point: if images can be optimized/compressed, you could save a lot of space without removing them and that could be the best way to go.

2) Storage space
This is what I do (no more honest recommendation than that):

Offload the non-direct-forum stuff to other services. Hosting server storage is premium in terms of price and performance. Makes no sense to use it for storing backups, emails or similar (I often see people storing emails on their web-hosting server and that's why I brought it up - not claiming it is the case here).

2a) Backups
Hetzner Storage Box (my article explaining the details and setup) for automated backups (and a local HDD copy as an extra precaution). It's practical, stable, secure, cheap, and reliable. 
$4 per month, for 1 TB of storage.

2b) E-mails
MXroute is great for emails - they are still selling lifetime packages (one-time-payment - mine, from 2018, has served me well and is still running fine, not a fly-by-night operation).  Cheap, secure, stable, reliable delivery. Offload emails from the forum's hosting server (and make your backups and migrations simpler). Why separate email service is a good idea.
$200 one-time-payment now - so not too cheap, but time flies.
If money is really tight, I suppose I could donate an account from my own MXroute reseller service (hoping that route doesn't bite me).

2c) Images
It is pointlessly complicated to offload forum images, but I suppose they could be optimized (compression, perhaps even size reduction).

3) Adverts
Can't please everyone - the alternative is for members/users to cover all the costs (I run my forum and sites so they work fine with an ad blocker enabled, along with a ko-fi one-time donation and Patreon monthly donation option - along with ads for folks who don't mind them). 
Each option has its pros and cons (and no good deed goes unpunished  ).

4) Cloudflare
Much like Google, a big brother that gives a lot of stuff for free and smiles warmly upon us (before stabbing us in the back). For now, it is a great help, and I use it regularly (but keep DNS setup export/backup so that I can run without it if needed). It does reduce server load to a great degree by stopping bots (and to a lesser degree by providing some caching).
It also makes setup and migration a lot faster and simpler (faster DNS propagation to name one advantage).
The bottom line is that even the free tier can cut costs (CPU, RAM, and especially bandwidth).
My Cloudflare privacy concern - fair to note.

5) Hosting 
In terms of hosting, I use some high-end reseller hosting, but I pay a premium price for storage, so that would not be a good option to host the forum (would be even more expensive than it already costs). 
High-quality shared hosting, on the other hand, could do the job, but probably not lower than what is already being paid - and since forum runs fine and I haven't noticed any downtime, I suppose the current hosting provider is good (ukhost4u from what I could tell).

I would recommend switching domain registration away from the hosting provider - that's usually a good precaution and idea.
Trying to switch domain registration also confirms that you trully own the domain (i.e. that it's not actually registered to your hosting provider) - that's best sorted out while you're on good terms and have a working hosting service you're paying for.

I would also recommend paying for domain registration for more than one year in advance. Never rely on auto-renewal, not for the domain, since it gets quite complicated when domain registration runs out for whatever reason.

Relja BrevityIsNotMyVirtue Novović