Looking for a good host for a community of couple of hundred members !!

[mediadrug]

Your requirements are pretty normal. So, any decent good host shall do. Which I am worried about is that your site is a forum. Which can grow fast very quickly and you have to be prepared for it. Now, a shared hosting package will get the job done. But in the future you may have to avail high end services such as VPS or Dedicated server hosting.

You are very correct on reviews here. Yes, internet is flooded with paid reviews. And it is extremely hard to find genuine reviews among them.

Majority of the hostings do provide ticket and chat so that won't be any problem. SSL on the other hand is the least of any worry. Go with Let'sEncrypt type of services, they are free and very easy to use. For this type of closed community you don't need much of any protection.

Also, you are based from which country?

Overall good hosts will be Knownhost, A2hosting, Siteground shared hosting (although it will be an expensive one), inMotion all are good options.

Whatever you do. Take proper backups. You can also use cron jobs for it. And have a copy of the site in your local machine. And do your study on your own. Choose a service which is reachable and also reasonable. If you are not happy with them then feel free to move on after 4-6 months.