imaclient, while I understand what you're saying, I would be more concerned if my clients could access the sites, rather than myself.
We recently obtained a client, and engineering company in our local area, who was not able to access their website while inside their office.
The entire outside world was able to access it, just not any of their employees while in the office. Typically, when they went home, they were able to access their site just fine.
Now, as far as the site was concerned, they were fine with this, because as long as their customers/potential customers were able to access the site, then they considered it no problem.
However, we quickly pointed out to them that if they couldn't access the server from within the office, that also meant they could not get their email from customers/potential customers. Needless to say the mood changed a bit lol.
It took us about a week of reconfiguring their LAN in their office, a lot of hours per day in their office as well (we were there so much that we mght as well have been employees of their's lol), etc. We finally realized that they were connecting behind a proxy, and being that the server blocked access after certain number of simultaneous access attempts from the same proxy, it would allow their site and email to load once or twice, but as soon as more than a few of their employees tried to get email at the same time, boom...no more access. Once we figured that out, and moved their account to a second server without that limitation, everything was fine again.
While the story is a little off topic, the principle behind it is the basically that, until it came to email, the company's ability to access their own site was of very little importance to them. They just wanted to know that their customers could access it, which was the case.
Typically, I guess the best rule of thumb is when you're not able to access your own site, go into troubleshooting mode to make sure it's not something on your end, or YOUR network's end first, before considering it downtime from the host.
I think a lot of folks forget that the hosting industry works on a very simple principle that powers the internet completely...
1. The hosting company stores, presents, and delivers the data, which relies on their own connectivity, and network.
2. The viewer/customer/surfer retrieves the data, which relies on their own connectivity and network.
Process complete.
However, any broken links in those two steps causes number 2 not to happen, and the viewer/surfer tends to fall back on.."Well the host or website must be down." or in more general terms, referring to the list above, "Number1 is not happening"....When in fact, it could just be that number 2 is not happening.
Bleh....I'm rambling again lol. Hope I was able to make that understandable, and apologize for such a long post to get such a short point across.