So I have been looking into the advanced hosting, it seems to be what i need. Couple questions on it:

1. I tried out the Advanced sample and noticed it has the same kind of layout for updating your forum as the free version. After moving your forum over to hostgator, is it as easy to edit it like you do with you guys?

2. With advanced hosting are you now able to edit the forum, say remove certain features like "view unread topics" button

3. After moving it over is the forum now fully all mine? Nobody has any copyrights to it but me?

Hello,
1) I'm not 100% sure what you mean, sorry. When you transfer to advanced hosting you move completely away from FreeForums.org and run the full and latest version of phpBB. To add new features you'll need to install modifications, but even though the ACP is different it is similar to ours because we modeled the ACP from the standard phpBB one.

2) Yes, you'll be able to remove these features. The easiest way to do it would be to remove the style code that tells the files to display the links, but if you wanted you could completley remove the functions of the links too but that would require a lot of hard coding. Having said this, you may even be able to turn things off in the ACP/ set permissions for features such as the "view unread topics" button.

3) The only copyright is that of phpBB. They request that you leave the copyright information on your forum, and state that if you decide to remove it they may (which means they probably will) refuse support on their support forums.