Here is a funny story and would appreciate any feedback form other on this (what I deam to be ridiculous).

Just spoke in the forum recently (cant remember which thread) about using PHP Includes for numerous things on a web site and ease of using it with a menu.

Rebuilding my fire department's web site and using a PHP Include for all of the menus on every page. I have about 3 weeks invested in this and about 75% done. Yesterday when uploading a page to a test director to check format I noticed a bunch of error messages where my PHP Coding was.. look here: http://grovevillefire.com/new_site/

I tried to contact web host (I Power Web) and as usual no response from them. Then I saw on their site an announcement that they are performing a restriction on any PHP Codes and they are no longer allowed to be used on their servers effective immediately. NICE HUH? So basically everyone using PHP INcludes had their sites completely ruined without warning!!!

Has anyone ever heard of this???

Luckily all of my other sites were recently moved over to a private server I bought because I could not stand any more problems that I was having with IPower Web but I had to keep my fire department's web site off of my private server because the administration and lawyer at my fire dept said it wouold be a conflict of interest with me hosting the department's web site (even though I was going to charge them $1 less a month than what I Power Is charging them now)

UNBELIEVABLE!!!

Lots of hosts allow server side includes. It shouldn't be a problem finding one. As far as you hosting a website from your computer for the FD, most ISPs frown upon it and is against their TOS. So I can see why they would want to stay clear of the matter.

I don't know what your fire department is paying, but finding another host should be easy. I suspect the hard part will be getting everything moved from IPower to the new host. My son has been looking at what it will take to move a site from one host to another, and it doesn't look pretty. Hope your move goes smooth.

My son-in-law is contemplating setting up a server to host his sites, and has asked me to look in to what is necessary. Since you are hosting sites on a private server, would you be willing to share some of your knowledge with me?

Well moving the site over is really not too big of a deal. I am actually re-doing the entire site and once all done I will just upload everything up.

When I decided to go with a private server I bought a VPS from Host I Can (virtual private server) http://www.hostican.com/ for $44.95 a month. I own several sites personally and the rest of the ones I do for people I charge them now for hosting which makes up the money for the server and I basically get my sites for free and make a little on the side.

When I originally did my transition to the VPS, host ican actually transferred all of my files for me at no additional charge.

And I will tell you one thing about them... their tech support is AWESOME. If I fill out a support ticket on their site, I usually get a reply within 15 minutes. As compared to my old hosting company (I Power Web) where I emailed them 3 days ago about the PHP Include problem and have yet to hear back from them. I was also on hold with them for 2 hours the other day before I finally got tired and hung the phone up.

BE WARNED - Stay away from ipowerweb.com I started using them 8 years ago and they use to be great but now it is awful!!!!!!

I have had to move sites to different servers. No problem, really.

Contact the new host server company. Get enough "space" to hold all of your files needed and a little more for room to grow. The host sends you all the unername/password for new hosting site. Upload your files according to their directions and that's it! (almost)

This is a good time to do some house cleaning on your site. Don't bother uploading all the images and files you no longer use on your site. You will save megabites of space (or at least I did).

Once you are satisfied that all of your hosting is set up and your new site is running, change over your DNS server info to what your new host said it should be. Need to know who is your domain name registrar for that. Log into their site, update DNS and wait a day or 2 for the changes to take place.

Once all is safely pointing to the new web hosting, use FTP to delete your files from the other server, and notify them that you are ready to close your account. This way, you still have your domain name (www.xxx.com) and customers or visitors to your site will never know anything changed.

I see I sent this in a little late. I'm glad you got things sorted out.

Using a VPS is not what my son-in-law has in mind. He actually wants the server to be in his on-site server room. He also thinks he can use a desktop box running a version of Linux.

He sure can. Unless you think you may be getting tens of thousands of requests a day.

Are you talking about a server room in his house or a data center?

Apparently, iPowerWeb suffers much cross-site scripting abuse if they are disabling the allow_url_fopen function. This isn't a big deal. My first question is, why are you using absolute file references rather than relative? The files are on the same server. Second, why did you choose iPowerWeb for your hosting in the first place? This is a serious (not sarcastic) question. How has their service changed over time in your experience? I could fix these issues for you in 5 minutes.

The issue can also be solved by a simple .htaccess file or a bit more scriting in the PHP file to only run the script from the same domain.