If you are having problems accessing your site and we can't duplicate the problem, it will help us to find the source of the trouble if you do a trace route and send us the results.

A trace route shows the path that your page request takes - from your computer to our servers. It will show each hop of your request, from router to router, including the IP number and host name of each router, and the length of time that each hop took. 3 test requests (also called packets) will be sent and you will see the hop times for each of these packets. A "*" indicates that the request was dropped, or it timed out because it was taking too long (if a router is down, the request will always time out). Sometimes a test packet will be dropped by a router because it is a lower priority than a normal http packet. Packets sent for the purpose of getting a trace route are lower priority than a standard http packet, so they will sometimes get dropped if the router is experiencing a heavy traffic load.

As a general rule, hops of over than 100-200ms (ms = milliseconds) are getting to be on the long side. Anything under 100ms is a decent length for a hop. But keep in mind that hop lengths are dependent on your internet connection, so if you have a broadband connection, all of your hops will be faster than if you have a dial up connection.

If you're on a PC, to run a trace route, just go to your "Start" button in the lower left hand corner of your screen, then choose the "Run" option.

Type "command" in the Run dialog box and click the OK button:

Now you'll see the DOS screen with the DOS prompt. At the prompt type in:

(substitute your domain name for yourdomainname.com)

and hit return. Wait for the trace route to generate, then click on the "Mark" tool in the DOS screen tool bar (looks like a dotted outline of a square) and hi-lite the all of the trace route information. Then click on the "Copy" tool in the tool bar and paste the text into a support ticket.

If you're on a Mac, here are links to a few places where you can get software for doing traceroutes (also note that MAC OSX+ users have a great Network Utility in their Applications > Utilities folder):

• WhatRoute (freeware):
  • http://www.mac.org/internet/whatroute/
  • http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=4911
  • http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~bryanc/
• IPNetMonitor (shareware):
  • http://allmacintosh.club-internet.fr/preview/206276.html
• iNetTools ($50):
  • http://www.wildpackets.com/products/inettools

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