[Nefarious]

Learning to manually mitigate DDoS attacks is the best thing that you'll ever learn. Relying on third party software will let you down.

Most people use shared-hosting, so they wouldn't be able to mitigate attacks if they knew how.

If you're using shared hosting, your forum is fucked anyway :3

Well actually it depends on the company, if you're hosting a legal forum for less than 5k users, a host like godaddy would be fine, as long as it provided enough bandwidth and had symlinking disabled ofc.