what does “***” mean when traceroute

All implementations of traceroute rely on ICMP (type 11) packets being sent to the originator.

This program attempts trace route by launching UDP probe packets with a small ttl (time to live) then listening for an ICMP “time exceeded” reply from a gateway. It starts
probes with a ttl of one and increase by one until we get an ICMP “port unreachable” (which means we got to “host”) or hit a max (which defaults to 30 hops & can be changed with the -m flag). Three probes (change with -q flag) are sent at each ttl setting and a line is printed showing the ttl, address of the gateway and round trip time of each probe( so three * ). If there is no response within a 5 sec. timeout interval (changed with the -w flag), a “*” is printed for that probe.

So in your case we can conclude that we got response only upto 201.118.231.14. Afterwards the nodes are not responding to the ICMP packets (type 11) upto hop 30 which is the max time-to-live (max number of hops). You can increase max-time-to-live using -m flag.

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