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IPinfo started offering free unlimited country-level geolocation and ASN details
- reincoder 1y agoAwesome, thank you very much for posting the announcement on HN. We really appreciate it!
- reincoder 1y agoI posted this post answering common questions that I think HN might have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928949
- tallytarik 1y agoIf you need more than country level data, these folks become very expensive very quickly. Many providers are orders of magnitude cheaper. I run one of them - https://iplocate.io https://iplocate.io - but there are plenty of other high quality and affordable services.
- tiffanyh 1y agoJust curious, what do companies typically use as the source for such data?
- ignoramous 1y agoHow to build a IP geolocation database from scratch, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507355 (2023).
- Nyr 1y agoThey are not the cheapest, but most often will be one of the most accurate thanks to their latency triangulation.
- tallytarik 1y agoWe and many others use the same techniques too. This is a concept introduced 20 years ago, and RIPE Atlas/IPmap has been a public implementation of this idea for the last decade or so. (However, the vast majority of IPs can't be geolocated in this way, and there are caveats to those that can be.) In any case, the difficulty with all providers in this space is how you prove accuracy at scale. If we assume some provider has some proprietary technique that nets 100% accuracy, that's great, but what do you compare it to? There is no ground truth data source - we are supposed to be that. Marketing plays a big role, and admittedly, these guys have much better marketing on this point :)
- Nyr 1y agoI have no doubt that other providers use latency from probes as a data point. But IPinfo allows way more weight from this in their calculations, probably because they have developed their own reliable network, unlike most competitors. Your service, like many others, accepts as valid most intentionally fake geolocation data provided by networks. I am sure you know this anyway, so no need to mislead saying "we do the same".
- tallytarik 1y agoThis is an interesting point and in my view, there is no clear answer here. Here's an example: https://ipinfo.io/172.224.238.32 https://ipinfo.io/172.224.238.32 This IP is actually in Ontario, which you can easily verify with a ping measurement. But it is announced as being in Calgary by Apple's iCloud Relay geofeed (https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv). Why? Because the intent of iCloud Relay is to obscure a user's IP address while still providing a roughly accurate location, specifically so that geolocation-based services still work as expected. For that to work, they need to provide 'fake data' in this geofeed so that they have pools of addresses covering thousands of cities around the world, AND they need geolocation providers to accept this. ipinfo accepts this, even though it's wrong. So do we. After all, geofeeds were supposed to provide a public geolocation database, the idea being that the network operator should be trusted to have the best information. We could provide the 'real' location, but if 9 providers say an IP address is in X and 1 provider says it's in Y, and Y is correct, you may just be frustrating end users of the network. But where is the line? I'm not sure, and it's hard to say who has the balance right here. We try to mitigate this by providing extra data like whether the address is a hosting or relay provider - for free, unlike others :) Some future addition could be to provide additional accuracy or source information, or even a 'reported' vs 'measured' location. We're working through this and hope to get to the right answer over time. Thanks for raising this. :)
- ecce_homo 1y agoUnlimited free seems great! I'm also building an IP Geolocation service with a generously free tier. I focus on DX and simplicity: https://ip-sonar.com https://ip-sonar.com - still in build phase, but the API is working.
- eurleif 1y agoThey've been offering this as a free database download for a while. Looks like what's new is offering it as a free API too. But the database download is more efficient, more reliable, and doesn't require providing IPs to a third party; so one might want to stick with that.
- reincoder 1y agoI work for IPinfo. Thank you for raising a great point. Integrations and maintenance were major issues when it came to users using the IP database. Usage of our IP database in software and platforms where data download facilities, maintainability (updating the database at regular intervals), and using an MMDB reader library were issues that were stopping us from universal adoption. For example, search/SIEM/threat intel platforms, distributed systems, firewall applications etc. So, we just decided to launch an API to complement our data downloads. It is easier to use, and the unlimited requests make it a strong candidate. We are rebuilding our backend in Rust and also developing a bulk enrichment API endpoint. The intention of the API system is to replicate the performance and features you get from a local database, with ease of use and minimal friction. Of course, the API is competing against the local database and will never be perfect, but I have to admit that using the IP database, particularly the binary database, and maintaining it is not as easy as using an API service.