"Nope. As a webmaster of several sites and general web-geek, I can't fathom why they couldn't at least replace it with a stupid little "Website Temporarily Down" page or something.
I guess they have a very unresponsive hosting company, or nobody on staff who really understands the most basic workings of internet technologies."
Well, I'm assuming they hacked the password used for publishing the website at the host, since the site was done in FrontPage. Still, a decent host has backup confirmation information on the registree. Mine certainly does. I have three test questions I can use to confirm my identity, plus my phone number which is the same as the one in the registration info.
The tech I spoke to today said that it would be no problem to change passwords for me and pop a temporary index page up to say the site was down. Once the new password was in place, I could simply re-publish the site.
If I was using my own server, it would be child's play, of course.
Exactly. This should take less than 5 minutes, assuming a live human being is available at the web hosting company. It's my understanding that this particular site has been down for several hours or more.