What is a Traceroute Check?

Oftentimes if your website is loading slowly, that means there’s a problem. While most website owners assume that there is an overload problem with the server and call tech support, a lot of the time the tech person will ask for a ping test and a traceroute test. For more information on ping tests, go here.

Luckily, it doesn’t take special training or much skill to run and interpret a traceroute test. If you ever have a slow response from your website, you can run this test and learn a lot of information to determine whether you should contact your hosting company’s support team.

What is a Traceroute Test?

For a computer to connect to a specific website, it must jump through hoops to get there from your home router to your Internet service provider on to the main networks. Much like connecting the dots, a traceroute (or tracert on a wondows computer) test will display the route the signal took to its final destination as well as the times it took to make each stop. In the big picture, a traceroute test is tracing a series of pings, which are discussed on our ping test page. If you are having connectivity problems or latency issues, a traceroute test will help determine which stop (also called a ‘hop’) along the way is the problem.

How to Read a Traceroute Test

The format of each line should be like this:

Hop RTT1 RTT2 RTT3 IP Address

Assuming you are behind a router, the first hop is from your computer to the router. The next hop is from the router to your Internet service provider. Each line after that represents a further router that your connection hits before its final destination. RTT1, RTT2, and RTT3 show the time it takes for an information packet to make the round trip from your computer and back again. This time is called latency and the same time shown on a ping test. The traceroute sends three packets of information to test the consistency of the connection. If you see any * it means that your computer did not receive a response and it could mean information is lost.

If you are seeing latency in the first few hops of a traceroute report, this could mean that there is a local network connection problem. If this happens, you will want to contact your local network administrator to fix the problem.

If you see timeouts (*) at the beginning of the report, do not be alarmed. This generally means that the device responsible for the hop does not respond to traceroute requests.

Do I Need to Contact My Hosting Company?

Once you have identified a hop that seems to have an issue, you will also be able to identify its location and determine where the problem is, whether it’s within your network, your Internet service provider, somewhere along the route taken, or within your hosting company’s realm.

The last couple of hops along the route are likely within your hosting company’s domain and if there is an issue there, it is likely they will be able to assist you to troubleshoot and fix the problem. If the problem hop is before that, it means the issue is along the route and not with the hosting company.

Go ahead and try our Traceroute Test and see what you get!