I also like how freegeoip is open source so you can run your own instance: https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip

Out of curiosity, what are you doing that requires that many IP lookups?

Tracking visitors/customers comes to mind. Definitely not uncommon to have 1000 uniques a day :)

I imagine caching netblocks rather than running individual IP lookups would cut down on the load quite a bit.

If you are geolocating, I would suggest spending $370 to buy the MaxMind GeoIPCity database. There's an nginx module for it and any major language will have code to run queries against it.

http://www.maxmind.com/en/city http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_geoip_module.html

So something along the lines of tracking incoming requests, then doing a DNS lookup on the incoming IP? Isn't that something that something like Google Analytics could do for you? And in that case, would this be more for people who are avoiding GA?

Google Analytics can give you this data in the reports but won't allow you to get access to it in real time in your application.

Imagine you want to redirect users to the correct country page in your site. In this case you need to get access to the ip geolocation in real time. GA won't help you there.

If your goal is geo-redirection then a 3rd party service is usually a bad choice (speed + downtime). An memory geo-ip database is the best way to go - but this is usually also part of what you pay for when you buy the non-free version

Maxmind have a free database (GeoLite2) that's updated weekly. Here's an overview of the accuracy per country:

http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite_city_accuracy

It's less accurate than their commercial offering, but good enough in many cases. For ease of use, there's a nice C API (https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-c) and wrappers like pygeoip for Python.

The problem is if you totally max out freogeoip it doesn't scale (or let you pay) for more requests.

But freegeoip's limit of 10,000 requests per hour is better than ipinfo's $200/mo plan (6,667/hr). Plus there are no limits if you run freegeoip on your own server.

Throws a SSL certificate error on latest Chrome (32.0.1700.107) W7 64

Looks like no immediate fix either, which is a shame as I wanted to use it client side but (a) need SSL and (b) can't ignore Chrome (it fails on Chrome for Android latest too)..

https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip/issues/32

This database does not know my ip address. I assume then they use a free database then so you should pay nothing either...

Anyway, this 'quality' should be free anyway ;-)

I think pretty much all pay-versions aren't 100% accurate either, from my experiences anyway.

He's not saying the paid one's are 100% accurate (obviously they aren't), but they are better.

Right, but the point is that just because it doesn't show up doesn't mean the paid is better.

Why not check both rather than just one?

Thanks for that! I'm building a small script which may evolve in a service and I was retrieving IP addresses using curl, this is way more clean. Thanks!

Yeah that's also a great service. It doesn't include the network organization or hostname though, which you may or may not need.

How often is the AS info updated? What source do you use, and how do you handle multi-homed IP addresses?

IP addresses should only be announced by one ASN at a time (regardless if that AS is multihomed or singlehomed). If that's not the case that's usually a hint of prefix hijacking.

It's also more accurate, ipinfo.io thinks I'm in Enfield whereas freegeoip.net accurately identifies that I'm in London.

Interesting - freegeoip.net thinks I'm about 30km from Brisbane in the opposite direction to the side I'm on.

ipinfo.io thinks I'm in Brisbane, which is slightly more accurate (although also less specific), although still about 25km out.

/waves at another Brisbanite on HN

It gets my Location wrongish here on the Gold Coast, but not too far out. We have huge suburbs though, all of the GeoIP DB's seem to think im in the wrong suburb, despite having a static IP on Telstra cable.

Heh, thinks I'm in Romford (east London), even though I'm in west London!

yeah, ipinfo thinks I'm about an hour east on the other side of Atlanta.

freegeoip also has https support for free.

I use it for my bitcoin client: https://github.com/bit-c/bitc