I haven't played online in a few years, but when I was doing it, you needed to have the sending and receiving city both at the same time frame.
For instance, if your sending city is at Dec Year 2 when you gift or volunteer services and the receiving city is at Aug Year 1, you will have to run the receiving city to Dec Year 2, at which point the services will start to show up. I always play an entire region too, and it helps to play each city a few months at a time, trying to keep them in about the same 6 month period, even if you don't plop anything or do anything with the others for a while.
With commuting Sims, you also have to have a bus terminal and bus stops in both cities in order to get them to commute. Again, they won't start at all until both cities have hit the point in time that the bus terminal was placed in each city.
It's not possible to move your region from one server to another. To move the region from online to offline, use these instructions: http://answers.ea.com/t5/SimCity-2013/SimCity-update-10-3-release-notes/td-p/4084353 Once it's moved to offline, you still have to log in to Origin to play. That part really annoys me, but it's the only way to keep the game running.