There are many factors which could affect this, network failures, the remote site is down or the network is just overloaded. If you want to find out what what is wrong the best way is to use the ‘traceroute’ command from a Command Prompt : eg : tracert www.aone.com.au (replace www.aone.com.au with the site your are trying to contact) This will respond by giving you a list of all the servers through which your connection passes on its way to the remote site. It will also give you a list of ‘ping’ times (response times) of each of those “links in the chain”. You should be able to see which is the slowest link in the chain and also where the path is broken if this is the case. Alternatively, type ping www.aone.com.au (replace www.aone.com.au with the server name you are trying to contact) will give you a 4 line response indicating two things (a) the server at the other end is able to respond and (b) the ping time (round trip response time) from that server.
