It seems my host has packed up and gone, with site displays HTTP 404 and my site, Gateway Timeout.

What options do I have? I am quite new to this domain stuff.

If your host is gone, you'll have to find another.
However, you may want to post who it is. As they (or you) may be having some temporary problems.

If you are the legal owner of the domain name, you can easily move it to another hosting company. To do this, first you must find out who your "registrar" is. To do this, go to www.internic.net/whois.html and enter your domain into the search box. It should return the name and web site address of the registrar.

Go to that web site, and do a search to confirm that it is owned by you. Once you have confirmed this, you can;

1.) Sign up with another hosting company
2.) They will probably send you an email with their name servers. Go to the registrar page and update the name servers as per that email or information. If you're not sure how to do this, I think most hosts will be happy to help you.

As for your old host which seems to have gone out of business (I'd confirm this first), go to your bank and do a chargeback to get your money back if you paid a year in advance for example.

IMHO it's always a better idea to pay month to month, just to be safe. :)

Domain Name: DS2WEB.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
Name Server: NS2.LTORDO.COM
Name Server: NS1.LTORDO.COM
Updated Date: 14-may-2002

Is the result I get.

As you can see ltordo is my host.

I have edited my NS back to the original free redirection serivices they provide in the hope that either Ltordo comes back or I get another host :)