Thanks Beam.
I contacted our ISP yesterday and they said they've had network problems ongoing all this week, and have asked us to note any further downtime in any future correspondance with them. Also, if anyone has noticed extremely slow response can you please take note of that as well, and post all info in this thread.
At least this way we can show their servers are being unresponsive and we will be able get moved to a better server (if indeed that is the problem).