I've sent a couple of emails. First one was as speedy as anyone could ask for. The second one (to Jeremy Lebo, btw) is yet to be answered. The second one is the one I need to get things going. Shell.
Tried to ssh in from my home box. No go with putty. So, tried Secure Shell for Workstations with the same results. "shell is not available on your server".
Funny thing is: In my parallels control panel the server is shown as centOS. If I access the site thru the numeric IP, it says apache running under Fedora. I asked about that too.
If I could see a shell prompt I'd know which os is running.
Don't want to call and interrupt them. They'll get to the mail. Just thought one of you here would know the magic spell that opens the door.

@Perk thanks for the offer, but intervention at that level might come back to bite me in the nether regions later. I don't like to break the chain of command as long as there are other options.