How do I run a Traceroute?

The following article explains how to perform a traceroute for your site. A traceroute records the amount of time it takes a webpage to load on your local machine. It traces the path taken from your local machine to our server, which can be a web server, mail server, or SQL server.

For Windows customers, we recommend using a program called WinMTR. If you are unable to install programs on your workstation, you can use the built in traceroute function.

To perform a traceroute on a Windows machine using WinMTR, please follow these steps:

1. Open a browser and navigate to http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/
2. Under Download, click the winmtr_bin.zip file and save it to your local machine.
3. Extract the WinMTR.exe file from the zip file.
4. Double click the WinMTR.exe file to launch WinMTR.
5. Enter the domain name or IP address in the Host box and click Start.
6. After about 5 minutes, click Stop.
7. Click Export TEXT and save the results in a text file called tracert.txt on your local machine.
8. Email the tracert.txt file to support@hostmysite.com

To perform a traceroute using the built in Windows traceroute function, please follow these steps:

1. On your local machine, open a command prompt.
2. Within the prompt, type tracert yourdomain > tracert.txt.
3. Email the tracert.txt file to support@hostmysite.com

The text file will contain the results of your traceroute. You can run the command using your domain name or your IP address.

To perform a traceroute on a Mac, please follow these steps:

1. On your local machine, double click the hard drive icon.
2. Open the Applications folder.
3. Open the Utilities folder.
4. Open Network Utility.
5. Select the Traceroute tab.
6. Enter the domain name or IP address of your website and click Trace.
7. Copy the results and email them to support@hostmysite.com