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Frequently Asked Questions

  • Frequently Asked Questions

  • I can't connect to my site or access is slow! How do I tell where the problem is?


    To communicate with your site, information must pass through many different machines. Any of them could be introducing delays that hinder or prevent access to your site. It is possible to view the progress as information passes through these each of these different machines (or "hops") by using a tool that traces the route to your site.

    An example of a route trace (hop 1 took 31.304 milliseconds or 0.031 seconds, for example):

    banshee:~# traceroute intershop-center.com
    traceroute to intershop-center.com (209.204.195.213), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 209.77.214.1 (209.77.214.1) 31.304 ms 2.899 ms 2.913 ms
    2 206.171.15.193 (206.171.15.193) 11.315 ms 3.798 ms 2.643 ms
    3 206.171.144.97 (206.171.144.97) 12.079 ms 9.827 ms 11.831 ms
    4 ign0.snfc21.pbi.net (206.13.28.82) 9.558 ms 17.798 ms 11.893 ms
    5 165.87.225.6 (165.87.225.6) 24.728 ms 27.81 ms 13.361 ms
    6 sf33-16-sar1.ca.us.ibm.net (165.87.33.19) 16.403 ms 18.496 ms 7.811 ms
    7 mae-west.nap.net (198.32.136.13) 11.714 ms 17.283 ms 16.785 ms
    8 core0-a0-11.chi2.nap.net (207.112.247.150) 51.162 ms 81.666 ms 75.412 ms
    9 chi2-axxs.net (207.112.240.142) 74.141 ms 63.582 ms 80.621 ms
    10 intershop-center.com (209.204.195.213) 60.646 ms 75.841 ms 90.515 ms

    Notice that all the hops are under 100 ms (0.1 seconds). If you are experiencing problems you'll likely see some hops over 300 ms when you run this, probably in the first few hops (your ISP). The only hops we have any control over is are last two, we cannot control delays or timeouts introduced by your ISP or any of the other imtermediate hops.

    If you have Windows, you can often run a trace route by opening a DOS window and running "tracert abc.com". If you have Windows and you don't have "tracert.exe" in /windows (or simply want an easier-to-use interface):
    - Ping Plotter is an excellent free monitoring tool (download version 1.10)
    - TJPing is decent and free (download version 2.0)

    A good way to see if the problem is with your site is to trace the route to your site from other servers around the world and compare those route traces to yours. If other servers can access your site OK, then the problem is clearly not with your site. Another place to run traceroutes.

    If you get a "lookup failed" or a similar error, that means that your IP address could not be looked up. This could mean that the organization that registered your domain has disabled access to your site because you failed to pay for your domain registration or renewal. You will need to check the status by contacting them.

    Updated: 08/06/02


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