Trying to trace the time it takes for my website hosted in New Zealand to be accessed from the US

Question

I live in New Zealand and I just started a website which I also have hosted in New Zealand as novazeal.com and novazeal.co.nz. I am hoping to target clients overseas though as well as in New Zealand so I trying to decide whether to start a second website hosted in the US and point the .com domain to that website instead.

I have heard from friends in the States that a site I had hosted here in New Zealand was slow to access, so what I really need to do is get the time it takes for a traceroute to hop through a location in the US. A normal tracert from my computer here will hop through servers in NZ only, so I can't get the measure I am looking for by using a normal tracert. Does anyone know of an alternative I could use such as an application that forces hops through a distant ISP, or a proxy service that gives the time it takes to retrieve a page from a distant location.

Of course if anyone in the States is willing to run the trace for me and send me the hop time stats I would be most grateful. I could ask the friends I mentioned, but they are not particularly technical, so it would probably be a confusing thing to try to explain to them by email.

Answer 1

There are web-based route tracing utilities, some of which are hosted in the US, that will show you the route and latency between that service and your site (at a point in time).

However, traceroute doesn't give you a full picture of the network latency effects to which you're subject: these days routers do all sorts of sophisticated traffic shaping and traceroute probes just won't be treated the same as your HTTP traffic even if you specify that probes should use TCP and port 80.

Not to mention that network latency itself is just a tiny piece of the puzzle. ISPs perform all sorts of cacheing using (sometimes transparent) HTTP proxies, from which you won't benefit unless/until your site is visited by their customers.