Can you connect to other servers with cURL? Like this:
$ch = curl_init("http://google.com"); // initialize curl handle
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
print($data);
I'm not a server configuration expert, but I've done a few google searches on this error. Another forum suggested:
enter - IP www.webassist.com and enter it in etc/hosts file
(I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it may be a solution)