Sometimes I feel like a doctor trying to interpret a patient's description of the symptoms. What does it mean to get an "unable to connect"? Is that the text of the message displayed by the browser? Probably not...there's usually an error code and a sentence of error message. The notorious 404 means "not found", and the text explains what was not found: If it's just a page, then the site is there and the message is something like "page cannot be displayed"; but when the browser can't connect to the entire site, it says so ("host not found" or "xxxx.com could not be found").

I know of one chronic problem with the servers from this particular hosting company (I picked it for myself after using it for a client). The server runs DNS, the Domain Name Service, which is the directory that translates site names like habitablezone.com into a numeric address; it's a digital phone book. For some reason DNS freezes periodically and the server needs to be rebooted. The symptom is that your browser can't find the Zone at all.

In a bad week this can happen daily. But I'm not sure it's as frequent as "19 out of 20 tries". But maybe subjectively it seems that way. The key to judging is to compare Jody's experience with that of others. Does it feel like 19/20 to other people?

If Jody's having trouble connecting to the Zone but not other sites, then the problem must show up for other people. The server can't discriminate against an individual. Conversely, Jody could be having a general connectivity problem that makes it hard to connect to all sites. But I'm hard pressed to imagine a scenario in which there's a problem with the server that only Jody experiences. More data points will refine the problem.