There is a little internet diagnostic utility called traceroute. Use it to figure out what the normal path is between your computer and the destination. When things are not responding, you'll get a bunch of asterisks at a certain hop. If you know about where that is, you'll know about where the problem lies. If for example forums.equipped.org responds to the traceroute, but you cannot get anything up, it is most likely a server software issue.

Optionally, you can take the output and put it through a Geographic trace program. I could not find a good one within 5 minutes so I gave up.