Performing a traceroute

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool which displays the connection "hops" your computer must make to connect to the target host. Similar to the Ping Test, this will help you identify any problems when connecting to a server.

You first need to understand how to open a console window. You can find a link to a related article below which will explain how to do this.

Windows

tracert <IP-ADDRESS>

Mac & Linux

traceroute <IP-ADDRESS>

Instructions

Make sure you replace <IP-ADDRESS> with the IP address of the IP or hostname you are trying to test. For example, if your server's hostname was test.nodecraft.gg and you wanted to perform a traceroute test, you would input the following:

 tracert <IP-ADDRESS>

When your traceroute is completed, you will see output similar to the following:

Tracing route to test.nodecraft.gg [173.236.8.83]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  RT-AC3200-57D0 [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    25 ms    12 ms    10 ms  bmly-core-2a-xe-803-0.network.virginmedia.net [80.1.227.201]
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  6    14 ms    30 ms    15 ms  nrth-ic-1-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.254.42.218]
  7    16 ms    20 ms    14 ms  m674-mp2.cvx1-b.lis.dial.ntli.net [62.254.42.162]
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9    87 ms    84 ms    85 ms  us-nyc01b-rd2-ae9-0.aorta.net [84.116.140.170]
 10    86 ms    85 ms    85 ms  us-nyc01b-ri2-ae3-0.aorta.net [84.116.137.194]
 11    92 ms    89 ms    88 ms  lag-5.ear3.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.72.9]
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13   146 ms   158 ms   142 ms  GIGLINX-INC.bar2.Phoenix1.Level3.net [4.28.83.42]
 14   144 ms   143 ms   143 ms  smr-c03.d03.s02.phx01.singlehop.net [108.178.63.238]
 15   147 ms   144 ms   143 ms  jay.nodeservers.net [173.236.8.83]

Trace complete.

Be sure to notice the time reported between hops. Generally, if any particular hop has a timeout (marked with a *), or vastly increased latency times, there may be a network problem that you can contact us to investigate. This isn't always accurate, and you may see some timeouts throughout the request, due to some network hardware not responding to these kind of requests. Depending on where the problem resides, we may be able to help resolve the issue, however there are times where issues upstream are simply out of our control.