Finally! Apparently I was caught between a server going down at the same time when I was due to pay my subscription for another year of hosting (this is with Tophost, essentially the same company I got this domain from; don’t click that link unless you’re prepared to come face to face with website that’s all greek to you). The server was brought back up, but did not know that I’d paid my dues and dutifully deactivated my account. It took a week or two to get my account reactivated.

As an aside, the emails exchanged with their sales support had the ticket information at the bottom, right where I could spot the following:

Priority: Low

Low! A week and a bit of downtime, due to a combination of server and billing issues, low! I think not!

On the other hand, a hosted managed Linux Plesk environment (no ssh access though) for €50 per year, I can hardly complain, can I?