What a traceroute shows you
Hop by hop, and why the first ones look the same every time.
Traceroute follows the path your packets take to a host. Every router on the way (a hop) answers with its IP address, and we add the hostname, the country, the provider and how long the reply took. The map draws the route in the order the hops came back.
Our probe runs on a Hetzner VPS in Frankfurt. The first few hops are always Hetzner's own backbone, before the packets reach the public internet. That is normal and expected.
How to use it
- Enter an IPv4 address or a domain name in the field above and press Trace.
- The trace runs in the background on our Frankfurt server and streams hops live as they arrive.
- Each hop gets its country, flag, ISP and ASN from our own IP lookup database.
- The map plots every responding hop and draws the full route as a line. Timeouts are skipped on the map.
Each hop is probed three times, so the time column shows the average and, when the replies differ, the jitter. Results are cached for an hour per target, and you can start six traces a minute. If you only want to know whether a host answers at all, the ping test is quicker.