awe and etta are the two webserver that run mudcat. When you call mudcat.org you will get one of them - if you look next to the Mudcat Cafe image at the top it will say which one you're using. It's called 'load balancing' - the website load is balanced between these two servers. You shouldn't need to know about it.

How the system determines which you get I don't know. It could be based on your location, or IP address, or something else. Last week in France I was sometimes getting one, sometimes the other. This might be because different hotels had different IP addresses, but I don't actually know.

You can connect to a particular server - eg by using awe.mudcat.org - that's how I know that it was working yesterday. This is not generally a good idea, but might get you in sometimes. (And my add-on won't work if you do.)

Services like 'is this site down' won't always give useful information. etta was maybe 'up' yesterday (pingable), but not responding. This morning it was 'down' (unreachable).