That last hop is across their internal network (whois on IP shows it's a single contiguous block owned by E-Commerce Hosting). This thing has borked routing table written all over it.
-Stoic Joker
So, in layman's speak, is that, "the hosting company is dropping the ball, so get a new one"?-Renegade
That seems a bit harsh, but depending on how many people are affected if they're unwilling to fix (or admit to) the problem it may be necessary.
The original question was ISP vs. Host because proxy worked. If the ISP was blocking then the trace would have stopped in the first few hops. If there is a very small number of addresses blocked (e.g. nobody else is complaining) then walking them by the hand to the issue (Given their absurd assertion that intermittent ICMP traffic is normal) could be next to impossible.
@4wd - That is odd, my ping times from here are much faster:
C:\Windows\system32>ping
www.head-in-the-clouds.comPinging
www.head-in-the-clouds.com [98.131.45.219] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 98.131.45.219: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=48
Reply from 98.131.45.219: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=48
Reply from 98.131.45.219: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=48
Reply from 98.131.45.219: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=48
Ping statistics for 98.131.45.219:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 71ms, Maximum = 71ms, Average = 71ms
C:\Windows\system32>
