Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

I was given a link to a good website today. I’d been having web hosting server problems, and it seemed that somewhere down the pike between my computer and my server at Hostgator, I was encountering connection problems. The tech support dude gave me a link to a website where I can check all the connections “down the pike.” Checking the IP connection is called “pinging.” The site is PingPlotter.

Let’s run through a basic scenario where we discover the route between your computer and an interesting destination (maybe one you’re having a problem with).

Normally, when troubleshooting a problem, you want to run PingPlotter against the server where you’re experiencing problems. Maybe that’s a web server (in which case, you’ll want to enter that web server’s address); maybe it’s a game server (in which case you’ll want to enter that game server’s address). If you aren’t experiencing problems with your network connection or something you access with it currently, no worries – just think of something you access regularly with your Internet connection to use in the exercise below. If you really can’t think of anything right now, feel free to use something interesting like quikorder.pizzahut.com or bigmac1.mcd.com. It doesn’t have to be food related either… If you don’t like Pizza Hut or McDonalds, and can’t come up with a server off the top of your head, use www.pingplotter.com.

It’s a free program that you download and use. I’m definitely going to check it out.