If you've immediately understood the domain name, you already know whether you need this or not. But if you're just idly curious, a traceroute does what you might expect - traces the route of something from one place to another. In simple terms, what's being traced here is data from one server to a website and sometimes back.

The main reason for using traceroute tools these days is to try and establish why visitors to your website are having to wait longer than they should. The cause may be a slow server or router somewhere down the line. Visitors coming from different areas and different countries are also going to be routed in different ways, and some of these may be better than others.

Traceroute.org is a huge list of traceroute and related tools around the world. So if your site in the USA is aimed at an audience largely in Europe, say, you can test the route from a server in France or Spain for example. You'll be surprised at the number of online traceroute tools there are, and often you'll be surprised at the number of "hops" a signal has to make as it dashes around the world getting to a website and back.

Even if you're not that technically minded, you might be interested to see the obscure places your browser request has to go to on it's way to deliver up the website you want to see. And if you're constantly irritated by long delays, this is a way to find out if there's a blockage somewhere that you can report to your ISP.

The only reason for knocking a point off my rating is that a lot of the links here are now dead. So you may not be able to run the specific test that you want, at least from this page. But otherwise this is such a vast repository of tools and information it really needs to be on any dedicated web user's bookmarks list.

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Jeremy G. Very useful...didn't know about this one but will check it out

8/19/10  •  Votes (0)