I got a question from a Web Hosting Show listener last week about how to do a traceroute. Now this might be hosting help 101 for some of us out there, but it never hurts to get a ‘bit of a refresher course.

Here is how you can do a trace route from your PC (Windows XP, Vista):

1. From the Start menu, select “Run…”
2. When the run box comes up, then type in cmd
3. When you get the command prompt, enter tracert yourdomain.com
4. Hit the “enter” key on your keyboard and wait.

For the Apple people in the crowd, you can follow these steps:

1. Double-click the Hard Drive icon > Applications folder > Utilities folder > Network Utility program.
2. Select the trace route tab and enter the domain name
3. Press the “enter” key and wait.

Hope that helps. Doing a traceroute can be very helpful when figuring out if your web site is down or if there is some bottleneck between yourself and the server you are hosted on keeping you from pulling up your web site.

+ Watch the Trace Routes Video Tutorial!