To run a traceroute to your domain from a Windows 95, 98, or XP machine, open your Command (MS-DOS) Prompt by going to "start" then "run". Then type the "command" and this will open a new window. After the window loads you can type either "ping mydomain.com" or "tracert mydomain.com" (replacing mydomain.com with your domain name). The results will look something like this:

tracert domain.com

Tracing route to domain.com [11.111.111.11]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 12 ms 10 ms 11 ms 10.105.64.1
2 9 ms 10 ms 22 ms pos9-0-oahuhimili-gsr2.hawaii.rr.com[24.25.225.225]
3 18 ms 12 ms 13 ms srp5-0-oahuhikili-gsr2.hawaii.rr.com [24.25.224.70]
4 70 ms 71 ms 70 ms bur-edge-04.inet.qwest.net [67.129.148.161]
5 72 ms 94 ms 71 ms bur-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.13.57]
6 71 ms 71 ms 75 ms bur-core-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.13.1]
7 102 ms 103 ms 103 ms iah-core-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.205.26]
8 101 ms 102 ms 104 ms iah-edge-01.inet.qwest.net [205.171.31.46]
9 107 ms 108 ms 107 ms 11.111.111.11
10 109 ms 108 ms 119 ms vl130.core1.domain.com [11.111.111.11]
11 127 ms 107 ms 109 ms vl905.aggr5.domain.com [11.111.111.11]
12 108 ms 108 ms 109 ms domain.com [11.111.111.11]

Trace complete.

When the trace is complete, just right click in the box and click "select all". Then after everything is selected right click again and that will copy the entire trace and you can go and paste (ctrl + v) all of that information into an email and send it to us at support so we can take a look at it.

Interpreting Traceroute Results
Traceroute is a tool that traces the route that packets travel across a network connection between two hosts. The route between your computer and your domain on our servers will vary from time to time as the network routers involved attempt to find the fastest and most reliable route.

The name (if available) and IP address of each gateway (router) is displayed, along with the round trip time (in milliseconds) for each of three trace packets to reach the specified gateway and return. These intervals may vary widely as a function of network load. Lost packets are indicated by an asterisk (*). There are several factors responsible for lost packets: Some gateways don't return the appropriate message requested by traceroute. Some firewalls use packet filters which block packets used by traceroute. (If you are behind a firewall that blocks traceroute, the results show the route to your firewall, followed by a line of asterisks.) Finally, packets may be lost as a result of network congestion (heavy load). World Wide Web clients and servers normally recover automatically when a small percentage of packets are lost with no indication to the user except for slower response time.

What you want to look for in your traceroute results are any asterisks (*) or excessively high numbers in the time columns. "Excessively high" is a relative term, and depends in part upon your own Internet connection speed. For example, users connecting via a 28.8 dial up connection will tend to see higher round-trip times than cable-modem or DSL users. A general rule-of-thumb might be that times of under 350 ms are "normal", times between 350 - 1000 ms are "moderately slow", and any times over 1000 ms are "slow" and indicate a potential problem. Asterisks indicate that the router did not return a response at all. If a particular router did not return any times at all, then that's a good indication of the source of your problem.

The first 2 or 3 "nodes" or "hops" represent your computer and your ISP's server(s) and router(s). The last two nodes represent your domain and the server it resides on (which are the only two nodes that we have any control over.) All nodes in between represent "Internet backbone" routers. These routers are provided by independent companies (like AT&T, Sprint, MCI, etc.)

If the traceroute indicates that the problem may be at your domain or its server, you should contact support so that we can investigate the problem. If the problem appears to be at your ISP, you should contact their support department for assistance. If the problem appears to be somewhere in between, there's really no one to contact, since the backbone providers do not support end users. On the other hand, they generally do an excellent job of monitoring issues on their network, probably knew about the problem long before you did, and are working hard to get it corrected.