Hi George;
Thanks for your reply. I have sent a message to my hosting service requesting assistance regarding the ‘Apache’ issue. Yes you are quite correct ‘hyypd’ should be httpd’. Please forgive my fat fingers.
As for how I invoke Maintenance Mode; I do so by Signing into my Plesk dashboard, selecting WordPress and then selecting ON with the slider on the bottom right hand corner of the WordPress Toolkit page. I do not use a separate Maintenance Mode plugin and had assumed this was part of the basic WordPress package.
Thanks again for your help
Chuck