[firefly007]

I hope you read this carefully as Ive written a bit of a noval!! lol

Don't get hookup with upgrading to 0'9 if indeed that is your motivation. Rather focus on getting your site up and running first., as 09 isn't necessary the shit!!. The most important thing for any tracker is tones of content, but if you hell bent of updating your source code rather use BT.Manager as there is a very easy DB porting script that Joe Roberson has that will move the entire db + torrent to BT.Manager db including added and converting tables if need be.

Don't get hung up with memcache as its for sites that have a lot of users and more importantly lots of users that are on the site at one time and the of course requesting data from the db to simplify memcache, memcache cache mysql calls there for limiting mysql load.
This is not required with a site with limited traffic. This is the same argument could be put forward for Gazelle + ocelot but to include Ocelot which is for trackers that handle million + peers

You said that you don't want to spend anymore money but you should have some kind of auto bot + some servers with some decent space, if you don't have a upload team, seeing that it seems like your site is currently dead!!

The main thing you must check with the current source you just acquired is how secure it is, I'm assuming that the $_POST and $_GET are sanitized against injections. You could proberly judge how secure the source code is because you have been a member for sometime.

You will need to get fulltime or parttime coder pronto, due to changes and upkeep including a new stylesheet or two.