These servers are hosted at the same company, 

however, the machine 208.99.198.206 is slow to connect to. (via ssh)

looking at both servers resolv.conf files, it indicates that they are both accessing different dns servers. Maybe this is the problem.

This is my traceroute output from both servers.. does anyone have any suggestions?

[tracerouting from the machine 208.8.34.146]
# traceroute 208.99.198.206
traceroute to 208.99.198.206 (208.99.198.206), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  204.8.34.145 (204.8.34.145)  0.361 ms  0.303 ms  0.219 ms
 2  204.8.32.86 (204.8.32.86)  0.276 ms  0.252 ms  0.238 ms
 3  208.99.198.206 (208.99.198.206)  0.236 ms  0.168 ms  0.158 ms
# 

[tracerouting from the machine 208.99.198.206]
# traceroute 208.8.34.146
traceroute to 208.8.34.146 (208.8.34.146), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  208.99.198.205 (208.99.198.205)  0.335 ms  0.269 ms  0.186 ms
 2  204.8.32.85 (204.8.32.85)  0.515 ms  0.468 ms  0.231 ms
 3  64.215.184.161 (64.215.184.161)  0.420 ms  0.369 ms  0.302 ms
 4  so0-2-3-2488M.scr2.SFO1.gblx.net (67.17.64.66)  27.724 ms  27.781 ms  27.730 ms
 5  sprint-1.ar1.SJC2.gblx.net (208.50.13.94)  23.409 ms  23.240 ms  23.402 ms
 6  sl-bb25-sj-2-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.241)  28.298 ms  23.268 ms  23.322 ms
 7  sl-bb24-sj-15-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.3.217)  23.427 ms  23.458 ms  22.898 ms
 8  144.232.20.180 (144.232.20.180)  26.715 ms  26.558 ms  26.267 ms
 9  sl-bb22-kc-2-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.20.168)  99.717 ms  117.081 ms  152.367 ms
10  144.232.23.86 (144.232.23.86)  99.893 ms  99.856 ms  99.470 ms
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#