Time to switch away from my previous hosting provider – 1&1.  Service has been great and the package we picked up years ago is actually pretty good for some things, but definitely had some issues that made it less than ideal.  Two issues in particular made life annoying:

– Custom DNS:  They verify that the DNS is properly configured and then take down your site mapping if it’s not.  This saves them resources, but my DNS provider(Enom) uses round robin DNS configuration.  This meant that the few entries I provided to 1&1 would never match up and the site would get taken down eventually(30 days?).   Usually not a big deal to put back up and resume the cycle, but a nuisance.

– Memory/Performance Limitations:  Whatever grandfathered package we had from years ago comes with more domains, but less performance.  Essentially not enough memory to resize photos on the server and general site performance was less than ideal.  I ended up having to create a custom build of the WordPress App for the 2012 trip.  It was also generally slow to respond and frustrating to use.

Hopefully Dreamhost solves these problems for a minimal extra cost.