Can a user force an alternate routing to a website?

[TaoPhoenix]

A friend of mine is starting up a reboot of his writing site called the Creator and the Catalyst.
The basic site is here:
http://www.creatorandthecatalyst.com/
The forum that I have trouble with starts here:
http://www.creatorandthecatalyst.com/dir/index.php


My question here is that I consistently get thirty second page loads and time-outs, and it's almost the only site on the net that does that for me. However rough evidence says that the raw site is up.

So I wonder if I posted a tracert so you all could look at the routing and if there's an amazingly bad link in the middle, is there a way to force my local machine to find an alternate route that might work?

P.S. It seems to be a bit erratic - like once the network finds the path, it serves the next several pages in a row or something.

[TaoPhoenix]

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\user.NONE-79DB031E3D>tracert  creatorandthecatalyst.co
m

Tracing route to creatorandthecatalyst.com [198.235.135.66]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

 1     3 ms     1 ms     1 ms  10.0.1.1
 2    46 ms   110 ms    22 ms  cpe-24-193-32-1.nyc.res.rr.com [24.193.32.1]
 3    13 ms    17 ms    13 ms  ten-0-2-1-0.nycmnyl-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.168.134.
225]
 4    79 ms    32 ms    15 ms  bun110.nyquny91-rtr001.nyc.rr.com [184.152.112.7
7]
 5    17 ms    16 ms    26 ms  bun6-nyquny91-rtr002.nyc.rr.com [24.29.148.254]

 6    16 ms    43 ms    15 ms  107.14.19.22
 7    14 ms    12 ms    12 ms  ae-0-0.pr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.159]
 8    14 ms    26 ms     *     xe-4-2-0.edge4.frankfurt1.level3.net [4.68.63.12
1]
 9    71 ms    29 ms    19 ms  ae-31-51.ebr1.Newark1.Level3.net [4.69.156.30]
10    17 ms    20 ms    17 ms  ae-2-2.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.69.132.97]
11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
12    22 ms    20 ms    18 ms  ae-0-11.bar1.Boston1.Level3.net [4.69.140.89]
13    19 ms    25 ms    19 ms  TOWARDEX-TE.bar1.Boston1.Level3.net [4.31.154.78
]
14    19 ms    21 ms    18 ms  bbr01-ae-0-20G.bsn01.twdx.net [198.160.63.136]
15    43 ms    37 ms    59 ms  bbr02-ae-2-40G.bos01.twdx.net [198.160.63.130]
16    25 ms    34 ms    25 ms  dcr04-xe-0-0-0.bos01.twdx.net [216.93.255.213]
17    29 ms    37 ms    30 ms  csw02-vlan232.bos01.twdx.net [216.93.255.221]
18    27 ms    26 ms    27 ms  v102.bos01.remly.com [208.118.224.222]
19    25 ms    41 ms    26 ms  web1.all-creatures.org [198.235.135.66]

Trace complete.

C:\Documents and Settings\user.NONE-79DB031E3D>

Notice for example the timeouts around Level3.

[Stoic Joker]

The timeouts are odd, but not necessarily damning - I'd be more curious as to why hop 2 is taking so long.

The site loads instantaneously from here.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\>tracert creatorandthecatalyst.com

Tracing route to creatorandthecatalyst.com [198.235.135.66]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

 1     2 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  

*  2     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  24.248.54.1
 3     5 ms     4 ms     3 ms  69.80.79.177
 4    10 ms     9 ms     9 ms  m1049-ftl2-10ge-1-1-4.fplfn.net [208.67.167.94]
 5    11 ms    11 ms    11 ms  m1070-nap-10ge-2-0-1.fplfn.net [208.67.166.70]
 6    13 ms    15 ms    11 ms  be-10-902-pe01.nota.fl.ibone.comcast.net [66.208.228.113]
 7    16 ms    15 ms    15 ms  pos-1-9-0-0-cr01.miami.fl.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.88.105]
 8    22 ms    19 ms    19 ms  68.86.85.5
 9    36 ms    35 ms    35 ms  he-0-2-0-0-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.89.145]
10    41 ms    39 ms    39 ms  he-0-10-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.10]
11    42 ms    42 ms    42 ms  xe-0-0-0-0-pe01.onesummer.ma.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.84.130]
12    94 ms    42 ms    42 ms  Comcast-px.bos3.twdx.net [173.167.56.98]
13    42 ms    42 ms    42 ms  dcr04-xe-0-0-1.bos01.twdx.net [216.93.255.215]
14    43 ms    43 ms    42 ms  csw02-vlan232.bos01.twdx.net [216.93.255.221]
15    42 ms    42 ms    42 ms  v102.bos01.remly.com [208.118.224.222]
16    42 ms    42 ms    42 ms  web1.all-creatures.org [198.235.135.66]

Trace complete.

[TaoPhoenix]

So can I do something that forces an alternate routing or something? Or is that "just not how the internetz work?"

[40hz]

It's basically out of your hands. You can pretty much only control the routing within your own network. Once it leaves there it gets routed where it does. You might try changing your DNS server setting to see if that helps. (It probably won't btw.)

[Vurbal]

It's basically out of your hands. You can pretty much only control the routing within your own network. Once it leaves there it gets routed where it does. You might try changing your DNS server setting to see if that helps. (It probably won't btw.)

Yep. Every node in an Internet connection has to be responsible for providing the services it advertises and getting packets to the next hop. If you mess with that it breaks the Internet - or at prevents optimal performance. They've broken it in one spot already. Breaking it again somewhere else just makes it twice as broken.

[TaoPhoenix]

It's basically out of your hands. You can pretty much only control the routing within your own network. Once it leaves there it gets routed where it does. You might try changing your DNS server setting to see if that helps. (It probably won't btw.)

Maybe it's not.

On a hunch I've been loading it today through Coral Cache .nyud.net

I dunno if that's what Coral Cache was meant to do, but suddenly it's loading every time.

So good enough for me!

In other misc news on another topic entirely, I managed to unhook some aggressive scripting via adblock element hider, and then the Wiki thing, so my web usability went up today! Hooray!

[40hz]

I dunno if that's what Coral Cache was meant to do, but suddenly it's loading every time.

It is what Coral Cache was built to do.

re: Coral Cache (emphasis added)

Publishing through CoralCDN is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. CoralCDN proxies automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, CoralCDN will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

I'm guessing you're likely looking at cached content rather than being served directly off the target site.

[TaoPhoenix]

I dunno if that's what Coral Cache was meant to do, but suddenly it's loading every time.

It is what Coral Cache was built to do.

re: Coral Cache (emphasis added)

Publishing through CoralCDN is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. CoralCDN proxies automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, CoralCDN will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

I'm guessing you're likely looking at cached content rather than being served directly off the target site.

Maybe, but for the site in question, it's a perfect candidate because it only updates very slowly, such as a few new posts per day. So whatever the reason, before every link clicked produced up to a minute delay (!!), where the cache might miss a misc new post but loads mostly normally - I'll take that!

[TaoPhoenix]

Update: Recently the Coral Cache version of the link doesn't load anymore. : ( 

So I'm still quietly hunting for new tricks!

[Shades]

Then the cache got updated as well. The best way to go is as 40hz suggested: changing the DNS servers your connection to the internet uses.

There are some independent ones, with OpenDNS as the most famous one.
OpenDNS:
    primary: 208.67.222.222
secundary: 207.67.220.220

Level3:
    primary: 209.244.0.3
secundary: 209.244.0.4

Google:
    primary: 8.8.8.8
secundary: 8.8.4.4

Comodo Secure DNS:
    primary: 8.26.56.26
secundary: 8.20.247.20

OpenNIC:
    primary: 216.87.84.211
secundary: 23.90.4.6

Public-Root:
    primary: 199.5.157.131
secundary: 208.71.35.137

Dyn:
    primary: 216.146.35.35
secundary: 216.146.36.36

If you don't know how to change these, the internet is filled with instructions on how to do this for any operating system.

[TaoPhoenix]

Yeah, I don't yet know, so that's one more project!

[TaoPhoenix]

Then the cache got updated as well. The best way to go is as 40hz suggested: changing the DNS servers your connection to the internet uses.
...

I looked at an article that Shades gave me on this stuff. I might have done that if I were having terrible overall problems. But it's mostly one single site, with a few occasional flukes elsewhere, and the downside of messing this up bothers me.

So today I went a different route. I went to a proxy server at proxybrowsing.com and pasted the url in there, and it seems to work much better (at least for now!)

My logic is that whatever fluky local glitch in my exact connection, it doesn't exist from their side. So we'll see!