When you experience trouble connecting to your website, it may be that there is network congestion somewhere between you and the server. One way of determining the location of the bottleneck is to do a traceroute. Windows includes a command line utility for this purpose.
Procedure
On Windows:
- Open a Command Prompt (Start menu / All Programs / Accessories).
- Enter tracert mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your actual domain name).
- The report will show the hops (network nodes) on the route between your computer and the server. Study the response time to each hop. Hops with slow response times often indicate network congestion.
On Apple Mac:
- Launch Network Utility.
- Click Traceroute.
- Enter mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your actual domain name).
Click Trace.
Select the results, and then right-click and select Copy or press COMMAND+C to copy the text.
Paste the text into a text editor (TextEdit, etc.) and save the file.
Interpretation
Slow responses in the earlier hops typically point to problems on your local network or with your ISP.
- Slow responses from intermediate nodes usually point to network congestion along the route between your ISP and our server network.
- The server hosting your domain will be shown as the last hop in the report. No response (time-out) from the server may indicate a problem with the server, but more likely indicates that our firewall is actively blocking your connection.
Requesting support
If you are unsure about interpreting the traceroute results, or suspect there is a problem in our server network, or suspect that our firewall may be blocking your connection, then please submit your traceroute results to us:
- On Windows, right-click the Command Prompt window title bar, and do Select All (Edit submenu). Right-click the title bar again and do Copy (Edit submenu). Doing this will copy the text into your Windows Clipboard.
- On Apple Mac, select the results, and then right-click and select Copy or press COMMAND+C to copy the text.
- Paste the text in an email addressed to us.
- Please include your public IP address in your message. You can view your IP address by googling for "what is my IP address.
