After several calls to the hosting provider (GoDaddy), I think I finally got an accurate diagnosis on what has made this blog unreachable at times during the past four days. It was a denial of service (DoS) attack.
I have upgraded the hosting level to get around the problem. Previously, the IP address of acornabbey.com was shared with a great many other domains. Thus a DoS attack on one of those domains would effect all of the many domains that are sharing a server and a TCP/IP address. The upgraded hosting plan includes a unique TCP/IP address for acornabbey.com.
I should emphasize that it was not acornabbey.com that was the target of the DoS attack. This domain was just collateral damage. If you’ve had trouble reaching the blog recently, I apologize. We should be out of the woods now (but we’re still Into the Woods. 🙂 )