workaround proved to not induce any migraines, because it replaced one line of code (the file_get_contents() function) with seven lines of somewhat awe-inspiring and imposing cURL functions. It looked like this: $ch = curl_init(); $timeout = 0; // set to zero for no timeout curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $apiURL.urlencode($address)); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch,