reCaptcha returning 'Host Is Down'

As described above, when using the reCaptcha plugin on Site A, I get an error returned:

Ambethia::ReCaptcha::ReCaptchaError (Host is down - connect(2)):

However, on Site B (both running locally) reCaptcha works. A bit more experiementing with Site A and I got it to work, by doing something rather....odd.

      system("ping -c 1 #{RECAPTCHA_VERIFY_SERVER}")
      recaptcha = Net::HTTP.post_form URI.parse("http://#{RECAPTCHA_VERIFY_SERVER}/verify"), {
        :privatekey => ENV['RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY'],
        :remoteip   => request.remote_ip,
        :challenge  => params[:recaptcha_challenge_field],
        :response   => params[:recaptcha_response_field]
      }

Yes, I put a single ping to the server before I posted the form. It was originally just a logger statement to see if my app could ping the server, however after it worked, I left it implemented.

Looking to see if perhaps we can figure out what's causing this oddity, and why the ping allows it to work.