I have recently moved to a new host. Once in a while, I get some hesitation when loading pages. When I ping the host, I sometimes get a timed out in 1 or more of the 5 tries. I try cnet's ping tool at these times, also, and they also will time out in one or more of their tries during these periods.

How much of this is considered "normal"?
Is this the fault of net congestion, or the host?

My old host was so bad, I don't have much to compare to.

Would you mind revealing who your host is? That way, a number of us can also ping/traceroute the hosts and see if it's a persistent problem.

It may be either that your host may be having some minor troubles occasionally, or it may be that one of the routers has a problem (which may be out of your host's jurisdiction - they'd have to ask their upstream provider to check).

My new host is thinkhost. They have been fine, except for these brief lapses.

Keep shooting tracert's on it for a few days... see if the problem appears to be at the host, or on the way there. Oftentimes these are transitory problems that resolve themselves.

(Along with more formal diagnostics, I keep shortcuts on the desktop with tracert's for all our sites, and just belt them at random throughout the day.)

I'd also suggest a search (top of page) of this site for other postings concerning ThinkHost.com