Fair enough, good point. I guess the advantage with a direct connection is that if you're the last person to take your turn, you straight away automatically download the new turn, and it's impossible not to look at it, and then it's very hard not to take it - so people tend to immediately take the next turn.
Myself I can't offer a direct connection (stupid university firewall) but I guess it'd be possible to do a bit of teamwork to start the game on someone else's computer and then transfer it to the llamaserver. It'd be very easy to transfer - I just need the ftherlnd file.
By the way, are people using the website? Myself I find myself checking it loads, but I don't know if everyone else has found it.
Incidentally you can go straight to the Alpaca page at
http://www.llamaserver.net/gameinfo.cgi?game=Alpaca - for some reason that doesn't appear in your address bar normally (anyone know how to fix that?), but if you follow that link once you can then bookmark it.