[thesite] what's wrong with my site? which server is down?

[rudy]

can one of you network gurus please walk me through 
the process of finding out what's wrong when my site
comes up with the error message "The page you are 
ooking for is currently unavailable." which seems to indicate 
that it's my web server

however, when i enter http://rudy.ca/ into the address bar,
it sits there for a *looooong* time with the message
"Finding http://rudy.ca/" which seems to indicate that
it's a dns lookup problem

i stretched my network diagnostics skills to the maximum
and opened a dos window and tried "ping rudy.ca" but
again, it just sat there, with that stupid blinking cursor, for
several minutes, and then came back with "Unknown host"

is this a dns problem, and what do i do to find this out
for myself?  (in words of one syllable, and please not in unix)


rudy