There is a new island on Alice on which you can build a home. It's not too far off from either spawn nor the main island, and there will be bridges connecting the new island and the main island shortly.
Alice crashed again, this time seemingly to a new issue I haven't fully identified. I fixed the world auto-saver and now it should force a total world save every 10 minutes, and the server is back up.
New: Both servers now have network tweaks to completely prevent block lag and reduce latency issues.
New: A New York mirror of the servers can now be accessed, which may provide substantial latency improvements for a small number of people (particularly Hawaiians). Access these mirrors by connecting to ny.na.vincent.sk89q.com:10000 and ny.na.alice.sk89q.com:10000 rather than the regular addresses. The need for port 10000 is temporary and the need will be removed in the near future.
Changed: The temporary addresses no longer work; use vincent.sk89q.com and alice.sk89q.com as normal.
I've been working on some changes to Minecraft that should drastically reduce the lag or perception of lag for those who are not geographically near the server. Coming soon next week! Tests so far have been extremely positive.
Ruh-ro! Currently we are experiencing some difficulties with the server configuration (though the server and host are fine) and so they may be down for a while until I can figure out the problem (Java spawning too many GC threads / raising the proc limit).
SKCraft