I am checking out some hosts and after signing up with one recommended here, I just tried pinging it but got a 100% packet loss repeatedly. I can browse their site ok. Should I be concerned?

Thanks for all anwsers...

Clarion,

It's possible the host has a firewall which blocks pings. I have a firewall on my house LAN that does just that... the idea is that people cannot probe your network to see which hosts are up. You can also set individual servers to ignore pings.

You might get better results by using traceroute (tracert on windows) to see what provider the host uses and how far away from you they are, though the usefulness may be limited if the icmp packets are blocked anywhere but at the host itself (ie. further upstream).

Ron

I did a tracert too. But even that ended with a "Request timed out" after the 13th hop. Is there any other way I can check for the response time of the host from my geographic location?

Regards.

The traceroute will eventually fail, too..since it basically pings everything along the path from you to the destination.

If you can decipher the last few routers before the request times out, you may be able to determine if you are really close to the destination or not. If you are, then you should be able to get most of the info you want based on the ping time to the last router you can ping. The ping time between that router and the destination should be negligible.

The only other way I can think of to test their speed from your location is to time downloads from their web site. Or find out who one or more of their clients are and test their web sites.

Ron

Now, I tried tracert from the control panel of a domain hosted elsewhere and it succeeded. This means that I cannot tracert them from my geographic location. (I am in Jeddah).
So this means that pinging is not blocked.

Does this mean something in terms of performance although their site shows up at an acceptable speed in the browser?

Originally posted by clarion
Now, I tried tracert from the control panel of a domain hosted elsewhere and it succeeded. This means that I cannot tracert them from my geographic location. (I am in Jeddah).
So this means that pinging is not blocked.

Does this mean something in terms of performance although their site shows up at an acceptable speed in the browser?
Clarion,

Who is the host that you are considering? If you give us the domain, we can try pinging/traceroutes as well to see if we experience similar results.

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

Well, it is none other than site5.com!

I sent a ticket with the output of both ping and tracert results. Can/should I post it here too?

<edit>
I got an email from site5 support saying:

--------------------------------------------
This is because we deny ICMP traffic to the machine that hosts Site5.com. We were recieving some unusual traffic and decided to block it.
--------------------------------------------

I am a bit puzzled because I can ping site5 from a control panel of another domain but not from my location.

Regards.

[Edited by clarion on 04-12-2001 at 10:13 AM]

*grin* I thought that sounded familiar. :)

Send me an email at mlightner@site5.com and I'll be more than happy to help you out.

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

No problem with a traceroute from Yahoo...

traceroute to site5.com (64.21.152.4), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 e-1.4700m-1.3400.yahoo.com (206.132.105.1) 0.882 ms 0.761 ms 0.755 ms
2 gw2-rtr (206.251.17.1) 0.699 ms 0.576 ms 0.800 ms
3 gw3-rtr (206.251.17.3) 1.127 ms 0.987 ms 0.824 ms
4 hssi1-0.gw4.sce.yahoo.com (216.115.100.249) 2.956 ms 2.628 ms 4.428 ms
5 peer-geo11.sce.yahoo.com (216.34.143.65) 133.786 ms 4.955 ms 2.896 ms
6 216.34.142.149 (216.34.142.149) 2.099 ms 2.130 ms 2.981 ms
7 bbr02-g6-0.sntc01.exodus.net (216.33.147.36) 2.234 ms 1.984 ms 1.913 ms
8 bbr02-p0-1.sntc05.exodus.net (209.185.249.98) 2.500 ms 2.682 ms 2.106 ms
9 206.79.9.86 (206.79.9.86) 53.097 ms 52.958 ms 52.551 ms
10 bbr01-g3-0.okbr01.exodus.net (216.34.183.65) 52.959 ms 52.779 ms 52.049 ms
11 bbr02-p6-0.jrcy01.exodus.net (216.32.132.110) 68.858 ms 68.352 ms 68.718 ms
12 dcr03-g3-1.jrcy01.exodus.net (216.32.223.115) 69.671 ms 70.118 ms 68.694 ms
13 acr01-p4-1-0.jrcy01.exodus.net (216.32.222.218) 69.498 ms 71.849 ms 68.750 ms
14 209.67.40.14 (209.67.40.14) 72.713 ms 72.809 ms 72.921 ms
15 s4-0-0.core1.oct.nac.net (209.123.11.25) 78.895 ms 80.452 ms 80.149 ms
16 vlan1.msfc1.oct.nac.net (207.99.21.35) 71.442 ms 74.061 ms 71.782 ms
17 64.21.152.4 (64.21.152.4) 73.909 ms 72.510 ms 76.214 ms