This couldn't get much funnier, could it?

[phil (admin)]

LOL, I cannot imagine moving this domain could be any more of a PITA that it has been.  Still working on it.  I will post a little more when things have settled down.

[phil (admin)]

Alright, well I can scratch 1and1.com off my list of hosting candidates.  I really wanted that to work out, but...

After xferring the forum code and data to 1and1, I needed to set some file permissions.  SMF has a nifty little utility for doing this, built right into the code.

It simply didn't work on 1and1 servers.  It changed permissions on some files, but not all of them.  No rhyme or reason to how it was picking the files.

So I attempted to use a second built-in feature to manually adjust the important files.  And that is where it got crazy!  When I tried to apply the changes, the entire site went offline.  That should really never happen, but I'm glad it did.

I'm glad it happened because it gave me a chance to try 1and1's technical support.  Within an hour of sending the E-Mail, the site was back up.  Trying the file permission setting utility again, though, and it went right back offline.  Yikes!  I E-Mailed again, and didn't hear from them for eight hours (and had to send a third E-Mail to get their attention).

When I finally did hear, they didn't seem to understand the problem.  "I cannot access the site," I said.  They asked for some technical details and again, went silent (this time for a few hours).  I called and spoke to someone that did say they would reset the site, but that it could take an hour.

So two failures:  A problem that allows some pretty well-tested PHP code to take an entire site right offline, and taking forever with technical support.

While I was waiting for 1and1 to respond, I setup an account at Bluehost.com.  I had come across bluehost.com when reading reviews of web hosting outfits.  I figured I'd give them a shot next.  Setting up an account was uneventful, as was uploading the web pages and forum data.  And when it came time to set the permissions on the files, all went as expected.

So we will sit on a bluehost.com server for a while and see how things work.  So far I've tried:

webmasters:  By far the longest-used host, but nixed because of their 250MB/day cap on addon domains.

umbrahosting:  Didn't even really give this one much of a shot because important features on their cpanel were not working, and slow response time for technical support.

1and1:  PHP code that works everywhere else seems to crash the entire site.

bluehost.com:  Current host, hoping for the best.