Best not to change core files.  Put this in a plugin so you don't lose the modifications when you upgrade Elgg.

Here is an idea that is more of what Evan and Shouvik are saying and merging both.

Find a basic theme, edit that all you want, it will overide the core view with no changes to the core itself.

advantage = learn how elgg works at the plugin level

Wonderful, thanks a lot guys

I chose http://lowcost4hosting.info/

I chose this because the admin is very friendly and helps at every point to make my site better.

I switched to Hostgator a month ago and it's pretty good. I read a lot of reviews on the net and people have always recommended it and little has said bad things about them. 

I was going to try Arvixe but I got my hands on a 25% off coupon so ya :P lmk if you need

I was using godaddy. They even install elgg for you (1.7.11) which i thought was cool. Didnt quite suit my needs tho. The AP server is slow, real slow. Also no node.js or anyway to install it without upgrading to a dedicated server. I need node for part of my site so running everything on localhost til i finish dev, then will be lookin for a suitable host. If you dont require node and you use thier US servers tho, i would  recomend them.

I only have about 100 studenst at my school currently, let's say that 200 students three months after up and running. Well, I guess you are talking about a dedicated server. Thank you

From the descriptions of expected activity for your school's website. You will probably need a decent VPS Server (generally $25-50/mnth). However as the user-base grows *and (more important) the "site activity" [ numbers of users online, creating, updating data - beyond passive browsing ] -- then you'll need to carefully study performance issues to determine whether more Server power might be needed. "Dedicated" Servers come in many "flavors" - some ISP/Hosts will advetise big server power, heavy VPSs, 'Cloud" Servers, etc. But there are really few Hosting companies that offer the kind of computing power needed to support large websites based on Elgg - which (unfortunately) needs more than most of the simplistic style CMS type platforms being used. e.g. WordPress (Joomla, etc) power requirements are much lower. It is just the way Elgg has evolved that has power needs. I suppose in good time Elgg's internals will evolve to become leaner.

Super, understood. Thank you!

@sprach I see that you are using Yahoo hosting. First check if it meets elgg requirements. Also, read this to set up you database in Yahoo hosting: 

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/mysql/mysql-03.html

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/mysql/mysql-04.html

Rodolfo Hernandez

Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison

Thank you Rodolfo, MySQL is 4.1.14, I am now trying to find out if that can be updated as 5 is needed. 

I clicked on Install my PHPMyAdmin in the folder where elgg was, now I see it probably should have been done in the data folder. !