Donato has been hosting my music & photos web site for years, and I've been happy with his service. Unfortunately, SBC has kinda screwed him over recently and he's been without a connection for over two months now, and there's no light at the end of the tunnel.

So in shopping for another host, I found one I liked because they don't charge for disk space or bandwidth.

Not that I need an excessive amount of either, I just have a lot of photo gallery files, some MP3s, and some video files for download, and I don't want to be docked for it. So their setup seemed OK.

But now that I've signed up with them, I've got some problems and I'm wondering if anyone here can offer advice on work arounds. I've spoken to their people and I think I've reached an impasse, and now it's up to me to either get my site working under their system, or cut bait and run. Here's the deal:

- My site is www.geekhackfilk.com . I want people to navigate to that exact URL and get all the stuff there.

- I want to use the PHP INCLUDE statement in all my web pages. So each page has a common header and footer, and so if I update the list of songs to download, I only have to change it once. (I've also tried other formats for server-side-include statements, but those aren't working for some reason.)

- Turns out that they don't allow PHP scripts on their HTML server. For that, you gotta host the pages on their CGI server, for instance, cgi.geekhackfilk.com . They deliberately maintain two separate servers, one for CGI and PHP, and a different one for HTML and other files.

- So do I have to do a META REFRESH tag to repoint people to the CGI server? And if I do that, does that mean they're all gonna see "CGI" in the location bar? I don't want that. Is there any other way around that crap on my end?

- Even if I do get stuff working that way, there's another snag. I depend upon Gallery for hosting my photos and videos. There's a little PHP script you can run that's the Gallery Host Compatibility Checker (GHCC). When I run it, it says that the host is running in SAFE MODE and that Gallery won't work that way. I tried putting my own PHP.INI file in place, but GHCC still says SAFE MODE is on. Anyone know of any way around this?

Oo, my new Roomba just arrived. Gonna go play with it...