A traceroute from your own machine only shows one path: yours. When a site is slow or unreachable, that is rarely enough to know who to blame. The fault can be in your access network, in a transit provider halfway across the world, or at the destination itself, and each case calls for a different person to call.
The classic answer is to rent a small server in another region, install mtr and compare. TraceMapper does that for you: our servers in Germany and France and probes in 30+ cities run the trace, and you read the result in seconds, hop table and map included. The one path it cannot see is your own line: for that, run traceroute or mtr on your computer and compare.
Compare the path from two networks
Run traceroute (tracert on Windows) from your own computer first, then trace the same destination in TraceMapper from a probe in your country. If the probe's path is clean and yours degrades at the second or third hop, the problem is in your access network. If both degrade at the same distant hop, it is not your ISP.
Check a route between two cloud providers
To see how traffic flows from one provider to another, choose a probe hosted near the first provider's region and trace toward an address of the second. You see which networks carry the traffic, where it crosses from one to the other, and how much latency each segment adds, without opening an account with either provider.
Find where a path starts to degrade
Latency grows with distance, so a jump is only meaningful if it persists on every following hop. Loss on a single intermediate hop is often a router that deprioritises probes; loss that starts at a hop and continues to the destination is real. Tracing from several locations shows whether that hop is common to all paths or specific to one.
Reading two traces side by side
A teaching example, not a real measurement. From Paris, a trace to an online game server shows 180 ms and 20 % loss from hop 7 onward, inside a transit network. The same trace from Frankfurt takes another transit and reaches the server at 22 ms with no loss. The server is fine and so is the Paris access network: the problem is the transit chosen for Paris, which is useful to tell the game host, with both traces attached.
What you get for free, and beyond
Without an account or with a free one, one trace a day can start from another country. When you are chasing a problem, the 7-day Pass (EUR 4.99, one payment, nothing renews) unlocks every location, unlimited traces and the exports. To have a route re-traced automatically and be emailed when it degrades, Pro adds monitoring and alerts.
One-off problem? The 7-day Pass, €4.99
Everything in Pro for 7 days: every location, unlimited traces, CSV / JSON / PDF export, monitoring and alerts. One payment, nothing renews.