Hi,
Very often I find that the Magic Café takes an extremely long time to load/connect. It's on the order of several minutes. And once I do load up the main page, it'll be another several minutes to load up a link that I click on. This is entirely unacceptable. It doesn't happen all the time, but it is often enough (at least once or twice a day) to be a major annoyance.

Also as common is getting a "Server Not Found" error. This could be related to the above, since it generally takes several minutes of attempting to connect before I get that message. It could be that the connection times out. I don't know. Again, this happens frequently (several times per week).

I'm not sure where the source of the problem is, but I'd look into getting a more reliable server/webhost/whatever if I were you.

-Jim

Yes, we're aware of the problem, of course. We'd love nothing more than to put the Café on a fully dedicated Dell dual-xeon server, but that's not financially possible at this time. Even on a shared hosting account on such a server the Café would eventually get booted by the host anyway - it's simply too continually busy for a shared hosting plan (which is what it uses). All we can do for now is try to get it as trimmed as possible load-wise, which we're working to do as we have time to do it. I'm sorry you're annoyed, but we just don't have the resources we'd like to have, you know?

Gene, there is a dedicated server available with these specs:

500GB Data Transfer
100 Mb/s Port Speed
3.06 GHz Intel HT processor
80 GB 7200rpm hard disk

This is for $185 a month. I really don't know how much the shared hosting package costs and how much bandwith the Café actually uses, but I suspect the monthly bill is quite high

We've looked into those things, but even the cheapest of servers is beyong our capabilities right now. That's the guts of it.