hosting advice needed

I would appreciate some advice.
I create animations and web sites for the scientific community.  In
the past I have just handed over the work to their web master who puts
it up on their server.  The only experience I've had with web site
hosting is as a subdomain.  Until recently, I've never even registered
a domain name.

One site that belongs to me and a friend has been a subdomain on a
hosting server for nearly 3 years.  Due to a recent hacking they
suddenly decided that subdomains are a problem and will not give me
ftp password access to the site.  This has been going on for nearly
two months.  (they have been sending out the bills out right on time,
though). To solve this problem I registered a domain name, which I
needed to do anyway. I requested three weeks ago that the domain get
established on their server with a redirect from the old subdomain
pages to the new domain address. I thought this sounded fair.

I have been asking and pleading, calling two or three times a week for
these last three weeks to get this going.  I was finally told on
Wednesday that the domain address would be available in 72 hours,
which is today.  Of course, they are not in the office today.  All I
could get was client service's voice mail all day Friday and they did
not return the message.  I expected that I could at least get a
password to upload the site but I guess I'm missing something.

I plan to do some major, big-time complaining on Monday so it would
help if someone could tell me if it is typical to take more than two
weeks to set up a domain address on a server.  If it does, then I will
just be patient a little longer.  Our site sells a product so it is
frustrating to not be able to access the site.  There are also some
print ads and a magazine article that are on hold waiting for the new
address to be active.

If it weren't for the fact that I need to have the old pages redirect
to the new site and I am dependent on them to do this, I would host
the site somewhere else.  For now I am stuck with this server.

Any information you can arm me with would be helpful.

p.s. It's *not* linkline.com that I'm having trouble with.
Karin Christensen
Scientific, Medical and Veterinary Illustration
karinc(at)linkline.com
www.linkline.com/personal/karinc/

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