The internet is much like the crowded freeways of Moscow during rush hour. Traffic, traffic, and more traffic. And the traffic is trying to merge and exit much in the same manner as a freeway system as well.

It’s understandable then, that whenever there’s a large amount of people trying to use the internet at a particular time (say, Saturday Night movie time) the internet-freeways get congested and slow down. What used to take less than a second to load, could take several seconds or longer now.

It sounds like a first-world problem, and maybe it is, but we’ve all been there. And Internet speed is generally determined by your ISP. Your router’s signal is going to bounce around to other routers (one highway to the next) until it finally reaches its destination. Then the destination router sends it back through to your

router where the web page is loaded onto your screen. These routers that your signal bounce around on are some of the most crucial aspects of your Internet speed and they are called hops.

Each time your packet of information is sent to another source, or router, and pushed forward to the next it’s referred to as a hop.

At each hop there are latencies, so that’s why the more hops your data packet has to pass through, the slower it will take to reach its destination. Let’s look at an example:

To test the amount of hops it takes for your packet of data to reach its destination you can run a command line IP traceroute (Windows: start menu → run → cmd). This will send a packet of data to the destination, but also request that the hops it reaches send back some information. Each hop is placed on a different line.

We ran an IP traceroute to try and get to the always reliable veesp.com

Notice that while to connect to Veesp it took 9 hops with no longer than 7 ms of latency. Connecting overseas, however, took 14 hops and upwards of 140 ms of latency. Notice also, hop #12 and hop #13 sent back no information. That could be a result of many things, but the most common being that that particular hop has a large amount of traffic and simply can’t respond to the tracert command. That’s mostly likely what happened in the above scenario as we were still able to reach our destination. Had the tracert continued to get those errors, then we would know that hop #13 is where our connection issue lies.

Tracerouting is a great way to determine the strength of, say, a virtual or dedicated server provider much like us!

The Style macro allows the use of CSS to style content. CSS describes how HTML elements should be displayed. https://www.adaptavist.com/doco/display/CFP/Style+Sheet

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                    .home-banner h2 {
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                    margin-left: -10px;
                    margin-right: -10px;
                    padding: 2px 10px;
                    position: relative;
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