How to find the host of any website?

Ping request could not find host [website]?

• I am currently trying to assist an acquaintance of mine with some administrative tasks. One of these tasks includes figuring out why her website cannot be found. When you type the website in to the address bar it will either not show up at all, or the web browser will give some assorted message saying it cannot be found. I have tried Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari. I checked with her registrar and the site is registered, and according to a whois look up, active as well. Then I ran a ping and traceroute test out of cmd on my computer. It gives me the error message: "ping request could not find host [website]. Please check the name and try again." I know her domain name is correct. So I attempted to see what I could find about the host. She told me herself that she has always had the website hosted by yahoo. I checked with the whois lookup and it gave me yns1.yahoo.com and yns2.yahoo.com as her DNS servers. She also told me that she was able to see her website the weekend before last, but only discovered the problem this past weekend. Additionally, it is a regular informational website, and is not associated with e-commerce at all. I am really not sure what to do next. I have searched up and down the internet for forums relating to my issue, and although the forum may address part of my issue, it invariably strays onto something unrelated to the problem. Any help would be appreciated. I not only want to fix the problem, but I am fascinated by what I am learning along the way. Thank you!

• Answer:

  Why not share the domain name so we can take a look as well? Does she have an appropriate A Record created?