in this case it was the network
The primary network that this site originates from (data center) was hit with a massive denial of service attack and thousands of websites were affected. I've been hounding them to deal with it and the latest word is that the attack is ongoing but they have re-routed some traffic in a way that keeps their data streams from being completely saturated. There may be some intermittent problems the next couple of days but they say that the completely unavailable network should not happen again for any extended periods of time.