I live in New Zealand and I just started a website which I also have hosted in New Zealand as novazeal.com and novazeal.co.nz. I am hoping to target clients overseas though as well as in New Zealand so I trying to decide whether to start a second website hosted in the US and point the .com domain to that website instead.
I have heard from friends in the States that a site I had hosted here in New Zealand was slow to access, so what I really need to do is get the time it takes for a traceroute to hop through a location in the US. A normal tracert from my computer here will hop through servers in NZ only, so I can't get the measure I am looking for by using a normal tracert. Does anyone know of an alternative I could use such as an application that forces hops through a distant ISP, or a proxy service that gives the time it takes to retrieve a page from a distant location.
Of course if anyone in the States is willing to run the trace for me and send me the hop time stats I would be most grateful. I could ask the friends I mentioned, but they are not particularly technical, so it would probably be a confusing thing to try to explain to them by email.