PING your Domain Name Servers

Now that you know the names of your Domain Name Servers, you can "PING" them to find out a couple of useful pieces of information - their IP (numeric) addresses, and an approximate round-trip time for requests made from our web site to your nameserver and back (measured in milliseconds).

Use the Ping Tool oprion on the Main Menu (type in the full name of your name server eg. ns1.dnshotbox.com) and record the IP addresses that come back for your name servers - You can also note the time (in milliseconds) taken for each one to respond.

To clarify what you're looking at, here's the results of a ping to one of the other nameservers within our organisation:

    PING 209.172.61.198 (209.172.61.198) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from 209.172.61.198: icmp_seq=1 ttl=118 time=34.7 ms
    64 bytes from 209.172.61.198: icmp_seq=2 ttl=118 time=35.3 ms
    64 bytes from 209.172.61.198: icmp_seq=3 ttl=118 time=34.9 ms
    64 bytes from 209.172.61.198: icmp_seq=4 ttl=118 time=35.1 ms

    --- 209.172.61.198 ping statistics ---
    4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3033ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 34.736/35.062/35.382/0.274 ms

Pings that respond within 60ms are, in our opinion, fast responses, anything up to 150ms is acceptable, over that and it's beginning to take a while (Possibly a slow or over-loaded server, or a server located in a remote country).

The important information to record is the IP address of each of your nameservers - in the example above it's the 4 groups of numbers separated by dots (periods) - 209.172.61.198

One point to note: If the IP addresses of your nameservers are very similar (maybe just the last  digits after the final period in the IP address vary slighly) and the time taken to ping them is almost identical, then it's fair to conclude that they are located very closely together (even on the same single server!) - THIS is the situation that can cause your domain (web site and email) to vanish off the internet if an error occurs!

If you cannot work out the IP addresses for your nameservers, by all means use our free Check-Me service and we will carry out the tests for you - We aim to have the results back to you within 72 hours.

Now you know how many name servers look after your domain, what their names and IP addresses are, and roughly how long they take to respond (measured from our server). Now we can do one final test to try to get an idea where they are geographically. 

Please continue to How to Check - Part 3.