How do I run a traceroute on a Mac?

Traceroute is a utility that records the route between your computer and a specified destination on the Internet. It also calculates and displays the amount of time each hop takes. This utility can help you determine whether the network to your Web site is down or just very slow. We use uses this information to track the issue. If a customer cannot reach their site, a traceroute will help in tracking down the issue.

To run traceroute on a Mac, perform the following steps:

The following steps were created using Mac OS X. For earlier operating systems, you will need to download and run a third party utility.

(1) From your hard-drive, open the Applications folder, and click to open the Utilities folder.

(2) Double-click Terminal.

(3) Enter traceroute followed by your domain name.

In this example, forexampledomain.com is used.

Traceroute will tell you how many routers your packets travel through, and how long it takes for them to travel between routers. If the routers have DNS entries, traceroute will list the names of the routers, their network affiliation and geographic location.

(4) Check for times between hops that are greater than 200 ms or that return asterisks *** which indicate that your request has timed out.

If there are long return times, or your request timed out, copy the information and include it in a ticket to support@hostgator.com