Let me clear this up. Originally I was trying to host the bitcoin wallet (bitcoin.conf) at home but gave up figuring it must be some kind of port issue. I now have a VPS at digitalocean.com hosting the bitcoind server. The website itself is hosted at hostwinds.com and has a dedicated IP that I paid for.

My web host has no problem at all accessing blockchain.info's RPC API. Any attempt to make my own bitcoin RPC server available remotely has failed.