Webuser Forums: tracert times out on first hop

My wife and I own and manage a very popular forum board. Recently over the past couple of weeks though, and at intermittent times, I can't access the website for maybe half a minute to several minutes. Initially I contacted our hosting company (who are brilliant) and each time said that there is no problems when testing access to our websites using various tools from all round the world.

So I'm now starting to think if it is my ISP but we access many websites during the course of a day and these load with no problems.

Anyhow, recently I started doing a tracert when our website had gone down for us and each time at the first hop, it keeps timing out. Even when access to our website is restored! Getting confused now. Here's the tracert results (when unable to "connect" to our website:

Tracing route to www.screwballscrabble.co.uk [92.48.64.140]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 7 ms 8 ms 8 ms 10.162.64.1
3 10 ms 7 ms 7 ms 62.30.252.193
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 62.30.252.77
5 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms 62.30.252.53
6 9 ms 9 ms 10 ms man-bb-a-ge-110-0.inet.ntl.com [195.182.178.121

7 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms 212.43.162.214
8 14 ms 16 ms 15 ms tele-ic-1-as0-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.184.2]
9 14 ms 16 ms 15 ms 212.250.14.90
10 14 ms 15 ms 15 ms ge-5-2.the.uk.euroconnex.net [87.127.231.90]
11 28 ms 17 ms 17 ms screwballscrabble.co.uk [92.48.64.140]

Trace complete.

The above shows the same result whether I can connect to our site or not.

Now I don't know if this may help assist my query. We have two PC's connected to a Belkin Router (wired), which in turn is connected to the Webstar modem supplied by Virgin Media. Our supposed speed in 20meg (although most I've got during speed test at various times of the day is 8 - 10. Tsk).

Also, one PC uses XP, the other Vista. The Vista one hardly gets used (mainly for our kids and homework). Security wise, the XP PC has F-Secure 2007, the other, AVG (both ant-virus and anti-spyware).

So why does a tracert keep timing out on first hop? Even when I can't access my website? Is there something on the XP PC I need to do?

Many thanks and look forward to your responses.

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