It there a way to look up a website’s IP address? I am having a similar problem. My computer at work easily accesses a certain website while my home computer always gets the “timed out” message.
Open a command window (DOS prompt for us old-timers)
type: “ping straightdope.com” without the quotation marks
You should get data like this returned to you:
Then type http://69.20.125.245 into the address bar of your browser and hit return.
To further complicate things, the http://[ipaddress] trick won’t work if the site is set up as a shared virtual host.
With some dirt-cheap webhosting packages, you don’t get an IP address of your own. The webhost will do some fancy server configuration, and tell Apache to redirect requests to a particular server account based on the domain name.
I was once working on a site for a friend, who had signed up for a hosting package at something like five bucks a month. Since things were just starting up, there were DNS propagation issues, so I pointed my browser to the IP address rather than the domain name.
Turns out it was a shared IP, and the default account for that address featured a large, “artitistic” jpeg of a bareass naked dude touching himself.
Naturally, I was doing this on my lunch hour at work. You can imagine my delight.