Diagnosing your server’s internet issues with traceroute

The traceroute command, available on all Linux and OS X machines (or tracert on Windows), gives deep insight into how a packet travels from one location to another across the internet. Each stop along the way is called a hop, and these hops—particularly when they fail—can be used to identify and troubleshoot networking errors. In fact, we request that support tickets for networking issues contain traceroute output for packets both to and from the server in question. Failed hops are represented by three asterisks: * * *. Here's an example traceroute between my local machine and one of my SSD Nodes servers (anonymized for security):

traceroute 172.93.███.███
traceroute to 172.93.███.███ (172.93.███.███), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  gateway (192.168.1.1)  2.091 ms  2.245 ms  2.205 ms
 2  10.80.0.1 (10.80.0.1)  10.608 ms  11.540 ms  11.529 ms
 3  100.127.71.194 (100.127.71.194)  12.550 ms  12.506 ms  12.481 ms
 4  72.215.229.20 (72.215.229.20)  14.651 ms  14.609 ms  13.227 ms
 5  lag-157.bear2.Phoenix1.Level3.net (4.28.82.53)  17.735 ms  18.735 ms  18.685 ms
 6  * * *
 7  phx-b1-link.telia.net