Use PING to Find Network Problem

Justin

PING allows you to quickly verify the connectivity of your internet connection to the VPS server. It attempts to transmit a packet from your computer to a website on the network and listens for the response to ensure that it was correctly received. The most basic use of PING is simply the command PING and the destination IP address or host name.

For example, you can open a command-line window and use this command:

Start > Run > Type in cmd > Hit ENTER

In the Terminal window, you can type in commands like this:

ping 185.55.55.55

Or like this:

ping domain.com

This sort of PING command will most often result in one of two responses. You will either see something like this (which is a good response):

64 bytes from server.domain.com (185.55.55.55): icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=2.16 ms 
64 bytes from server.domain.com (185.55.55.55): icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=2.23 ms 
64 bytes from server.domain.com (185.55.55.55): icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=2.45 ms 

Or you might see something like this (which is not a good response and indicates either your internet connection is having issues, or the server is not reachable):

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

The reason you will see multiple results is that the PING command will generally attempt to "PING" the destination three times. For example, you might see this:

Request timed out.
64 bytes from 185.55.55.55 time = 250 ms
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

In this case, PING did not locate the destination in a reasonable amount of time on the first attempt, succeeded on the second attempt, and it then failed on the last two attempts.

This should give you a basic understanding of the PING utility when troubleshooting a network problem.