Why do my connections keep timing out before I connect to the website?

Web congestion? Bad connection if it is phone line dial-up modem.

Yeah it’s dial up alright.

It may need the pone company to check. We had, before cable, many times that the phone company had to come out and check the wire to the house. One time they found a wasp nest three telephone pole from the house. Wasps had chewed through the insulation shorted out the neighborhood.

I had that often when I lived in rural NH and only had 28.8k dialup. The local phone lines/switches couldn’t handle 56K, and that caused all sorts of hell, including the fact that I could only load ~8MB/hr. In my case, there was nothing that the telco was willing to do; it would’ve involved rewiring much of the county.

It’s hard to definitively answer this question without more information. There are a lot of variables that can cause extra latency per hop and probably a lot of hops between you and the site you are trying to reach. It might be instructive to run the “traceroute” tool (known as “tracert” in Windows) to find out more about what’s going on. It will list, in order, the hosts through which your packets are traveling on the way to their destination. You can just invoke it from a command line like so:

tracert www.fluther.com

or, in some Linuxes:

sudo traceroute www.fluther.com
or
tracepath www.fluther.com

traceroute needs elevated privileges because of permission issues related to ICMP sockets.
tracepath does basically the same thing but does not need elevated privileges.
I don’t know whether tracert is available to non-Administrator users or not, maybe @jerv knows.

Because of the NAT configuration of my router, traceroute does not work for me. You probably won’t run into this problem with your modem, but if the test fails after the first hop (your local interface) then that’s probably why.

Also, it might be useful to ask your phone company to do a line test on your line, particularly if you live in a rural or sparsely populated area.