Want to inform myself about buying a dedicated server

I currently use about 10 GB bandwidth a month on a shared hosting server.
I recently negotiated an endorsement, which should give me a large influx of traffic.

So I'm searching for a dedicated server for my website forum, but I'm not sure where to find information to inform myself about servers. Everything I search for seems to just give me "We're great, sign up for our services!" results, or affiliate sites that say, "heres a great list of server companies, do business with one and we get a % of the sales". So I can't really find any actual useful information.

Can someone tell me or give me some reading material to inform me enough to make a good decision on a dedicated server hosting site?

Some things I'm wondering are:
Has anyone used any dedicated hosting companies and recommend them?
Any anylasis of 100 mb/s unmonitored vs 10tb/month bandwidth? (is unmonitored more expensive? Is it worth getting? pros cons of each?)
What is typically a bottleneck that I should look out for when picking a server? Ram, Processor speed, HDD, Bandwidth?
My website is a phpbb3 forum, and obviously i'd like pages to load fast, is there something in particular I should look for? (for instance, do forums typically need more ram and less processing power or something like that?)

Any info is greatly appreciated!