Very strange! Changing your cache will not hide your site from view on the web. I suspect there is another issue with your site. IF full page caching was set, sometimes seeing a login link or editing could be affected.
What is your site URL?
Have you: found the log-in page by typing inhttp://www.yoursitename.com/index.php/login... (skip the /index.php if you enabled pretty url's)?
If you found the login page: change your browsers navigation bar to readhttp://www.yoursitename.com/index.php/dashboard... (again, skip typing /index.php if pretty url's are enabled)
That will put you onto the dashboard where you can turn off the full page caching in systems & settings.

Hope this helps

Adrian
Arvixe Web Hosting / Concrete5 Community Liaison |
http://www.arvixe.com/concrete5_hosting.............

Thanks Adreco,

I actually did try those suggestions before posting and I would receive an error message. I tried to skip forward and go directly to dashboard too, same results. It seems that in changing the cache settings, the site was having trouble accessing the database from the host server... or something like that, I still don't know. The host server went into the back end of the site and cleared out the cache settings so that I was able to go back in and revert to the old cache settings. I still don't know what happened and I don't plan on touching the cache/speed settings ever again. Thanks again for your response.

Here is a general checklist
http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/editors/the-block-do...

Thanks for the helpful checklist JohntheFish. It turns out that I tried most of these suggestions, but to no avail. If you're curios about what happened, please refer to my reply above, I'm still fuzzy on what happened to the site...