loadHTMLFile加载，但是为空？ PHP

so I tried to get a fix for this earlier but I think we were all going in the wrong direction. I'm trying to check two servers to make sure that at least one of them are active to make a call to. The service provides me with a page for each that simply has "OK" under a div with id="server_status". When I try to loadHTMLFile into a variable, it returns true, but I can never pull the element I need from it. After doing some output testing with saveHTML(), it appears that the variable holding the DOMDocument is empty. Here's my code:

servers = array('tpeweb.paybox.com', // primary URL
        'tpeweb1.paybox.com'); // backup URL
    foreach($servers as $server){

        $doc = new DOMDocument();
        $doc->validateOnParse = true;
        $doc->loadHTMLFile('https://'.$server.'/load.html');
        $server_status = "";
        $docText = $doc->saveHTML();
        if($doc) {
            echo "HTML should output here: ";
            echo $docText;
        }
        if(!$doc) {
            echo "HTML file not loaded";
        }

        $element = $doc->getElementById('server_status');

        if($element){
            $server_status = $element->textContent;
        }
        if($server_status == "OK"){
            // Server is up and services are available
            return array(true, 'https://'.$server.'/cgi/MYchoix_pagepaiement.cgi');
        }
    }
    return array(false, 'e404.html');

All I get as output is "HTML should output here: " twice, and then it returns the array at the bottom. This is the code that they provided:

$servers = array('tpeweb.paybox.com', // primary URL
        'tpeweb1.paybox.com'); // backup URL
$serverOK = "";
foreach($servers as $server){
    $doc = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->loadHTMLFile('https://'.$server.'/load.html');
    $server_status = "";
    $element = $doc->getElementById('server_status');
    if($element){
        $server_status = $element->textContent;
    }
    if($server_status == "OK"){
        // Server is up and services are available
        $serverOK = $server;
        break;
    }
    // else : Server is up but services are not available .
}
if(!$serverOK){
    die("Error : no server found");
}

echo 'Connecting to https://'.$server.'/cgi/MYchoix_pagepaiement.cgi';

This also seems to be having the same problem. Could it be something with my PHP configuration? I'm on version 5.3.6.

Thanks, Adrian

EDIT: I tried it by inputting the HTML as a string instead of calling it to the server and it worked fine. However, calling the HTML into a string to use in the PHP function results in the same issue. Fixes??