Hi, I was trying to gather some information on hosts I am considering. I followed the advice given on these forums and checked them using domainwhitepages.com in order to see who their bandwidth providers were etc.

The data under Traceroute for most of them finished with "Trace complete".

For one of them the end of the results was:
...
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *
Trace aborted

What does this mean? How should one interpret this information?

Thank you

Either there are network problems (like a router down) or they are filtering ICMP packets.

Thanks, as I have almost no knowledge in this field - could you please explain what does "they are filtering ICMP packets" mean? Can this be an indication for a problem, something I should be careful about?

No, it's nothing to be alarmed about. It's possible they decided to block pings and traceroutes with a firewall or at the router. Many like to do this as a security measure.