hey Bruce its hard to keep track of all the places to you post about the cms lol. thanks for the kind words as always.
yea as i mentioned in the emails, once you choose a file from ftp as a source file, you can't touch it. it now belongs to the cms. the cms will convert it into the chosen output versions and clips, then put it in the 'converted' folder, where it will eventually get deleted. touching it once you've given it to the cms will just cause errors. photo sets work the same way.
the server problems are certainly annoying. the servers we host the 'annual' accounts on are a bit overloaded. since the 'annual' customers pay less than our lowest monthly customers, it takes a lot of them to pay for each server. we do monitor and move sites that have high loads or a lot of hacker problems, but there's only so much we can do for those sites. our Plus accounts are on much better servers, where there are only 3-5 sites per server, and of course we also have dedicated servers. even purchasing a 'disk space upgrade' for $45 a month bumps you to a better server. we have 30 servers for hosted sites. only 5 for 'annual' accounts.
i look forward to help you complete your member's area transition so you can get away from YM
