Before I get into the topic at hand, I want to point out that, as of this moment, http://faqs.astahost.com/ which Moonwitch linked to in the "Answers to Common Questions", is now a page in Portuguese related to spamming.

Now my own problem is that I will be leaving the country for a few months, in a month or two. While I am away, I am not sure how often I will have access, or time for online activity. I read in a different thread that Astahost offers paid hosting for as low as $3 and change. Is there a way I can switch in between forum-participation and paid hosting easily, or do I have to have two separate accounts?

Nope. Your account can easily be transferred to the paid hosting - ComputingHost.Com, but only catch is you need to grab hold of OpaQue and he seems to have taken a flight.. (j/k) he's lurking somewhere around for sure - just grab hold of him and he'll happily do it.

P.S. Thanks for that heads up on the FAQs - I was shocked too. Have to see what's up. Very strange... I come back from vacation and all these funny things are up.

Problem fixed.

Astahost FAQs are back in action. It was all due to the last hacking attempt - they managed to reach this directory and wipe out the index.php/index.htm and replace it with their own. Stupid defacing attempt - but I always maintain a parallel copy with me here, so nothing to fear

right now there are no articles in the FAQ ^^ did never use it before and dont need to use it now, but maybe you should change that. If that is the wanted status: nevermind