Thank you. I hope you don't think I am pushing back or being sarcastic in any way because I personally like your work and really appreciate your comment. This is a typical conversation in a very "HN" way. Sometimes, it's hard to determine tone in written communication.
I appreciate that you make a wide variety of data accessible, and that has a positive impact. Our goal is to be the most accurate IP data provider, with geolocation being our foremost priority. It requires a "significant" amount of effort to simply be better than the rest of the industry. If customers want that bump in quality they will pay for our services. The ProbeNet has about 700 servers now, and nobody is investing in that level of infrastructure for IP data
accuracy.
The whole game for us is accuracy. Consider our free IP to Country database. It is so accurate that it goes down to individual IP address (`/32`) levels for country-level locations. This high level of accuracy, however, results in a bigger file size. Some developers compromise on accuracy over file size. While rounding up the ranges to `/24` and updating them twice a week would reduce cost, it does not align with our philosophy.
> ipapi.is for sure detects some hosting provider's that you don't
ipinfo 91.102.88.0 -j | jq '.asn'
{
"asn": "AS47292",
"name": "Sentia Denmark A/S",
"domain": "sentia.com",
"route": "91.102.88.0/21",
"type": "hosting"
}
ipinfo 185.45.13.144 -j | jq '.asn'
{
"asn": "AS9009",
"name": "M247 Europe SRL",
"domain": "m247.com",
"route": "185.45.12.0/23",
"type": "hosting"
}
ipinfo 185.50.248.0 -j | jq .company
{
"name": "ATOMOHOST LLC",
"domain": "atomohost.com",
"type": "business"
}
For the last one, it is not associated with an ASN, so the company field can be used as a proxy. As that company's IP data is a bit vague labeling it as hosting or business is difficult.
We have four types of "types": business, education, hosting, and ISP. This applies to both ASN and companies/organizations. For us, it is not simply a binary classification of hosting and non-hosting. Instead, we categorize IP ranges based on a statistical model with assigned weights. These ranges are then aggregated to determine AS types. When our customers say why is that this or that, you can show them the underlying reasoning.
But still, I grok and understand you. I really appreciate your feedback.