Thanks for your response Don. I know I have a tendency to write longer than kosher messages. I found something just before the concert (I went to a Sting concert this evening). Digital Nation got my IP address wrong in their DNS entry. It was my fault. I looked at that IP address at least 2 dozen times, but never noticed that it was wrong. So, they're fixing that, and I should be off and running.
Your other advice, however is really useful. I was trying to do the telnet thing, but for some reason, I was thinking that I should have a colon between the IP address and port 80, so of course I couldn't get it working. Now I've got some more ideas on how to fix such problems in the future.
Again, thanks.