See update at bottom of post.

I’m having problems directly accessing my blog from home. Here are the symptoms:

• According to Site24x7 and downforeveryoneorjustme.com, my site is up.
• When I attempt to access my site using either Firefox 3 or Internet Explorer 6, I get a timeout error.
• When I attempt to access my site using FileZilla, I get a timeout error.
• Verizon claims not to have blocked access to my site, but their diagnostic tools are down until tomorrow morning. Does Verizon even block specific sites?
• I can access other sites using FF3 or IE6.
• I was able to access my site when I was at the PDX and SMF airports.
• I can access my site from home if I am VPN’d into Intel’s network. Yeah, that’s how I wrote this post.
• I verified that my host does not have IP blocking preventing my access (at least, not that I can see through cPanel.
• I haven’t exceeded any bandwidth limits I can see. I’m not even close.
• The issue started a couple of nights ago when I backed up my blog, downloaded it as a .tar and decided I wanted to download it uncompressed. Halfway through the FTP download, I lost access.

Being a good Windows user, I’ve rebooted my computer and my FIOS router. No luck.

Although this doesn’t seem to be a big deal because I have the VPN workaround, it’s only a partial workaround. You have to be a network firewall god to FTP through Intel’s firewall. I’m not, so I can’t continue downloading my site or upload any updates.

Help! Any ideas?

Update. Turns out my host is blocking my IP address. It said I had 538 open connections. Wow! I haven’t changed any configurations and I’ve never had any issues.

I am running the latest SVN versions of WordPress. Could that be causing the issue? I’ll try to update it once I get access again.

Update 2: Support said that I needed to decrease my simultaneous FTP sessions from 4 to 2. I’ve never had an problems before with this setting, but then again, I can’t remember attempting to download my site in the same way before.