IP address - locality resolution suggestions

16 points·gregp··15 comments

does anyone have any recommendations for IP address to locality resolution?

Are you looking for zip code accuracy or just country accuracy? or something in between?

If all you want is what country the IP is from then go to http://www.ip2location.com/ and look through the forums. You can find out how to do it yourself.

If you need really fine granularity you will need a for pay service.

The Maxmind GeoIP database is what most people are using. It's quite accurate, has good libraries for many languages, but it's proprietary and costs money.

(Starting an open source competitor is on my list of fun projects to do)

What about their Open Source version - http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry ?

I haven't started using it yet, but they claim it offers only slightly less accuracy with access to all of their libraries.

http://www.maxmind.com

http://www.hostip.info/

Good if you're not completely sure of how much geolocation will do for you or you don't want to spend a fortune.

Low end: http://www.ip2location.com/ High end: Akamai (akamai.com) has a ~$10k/month hyper-accurate solution.

http://www.ipligence.com/en/products/

never used them, just adding it to the list

Anyone have any suggestions on some straight up locality databases (city,state,zip,country, international)?

What's so much better about the pay solutions?

1) Accuracy 2) Integration options

maxmind is great and affordable

affordable??

Yep, we're using it -- I think it was $20 for 20,000 queries. Which for us means 20,000 sign-ups. We're happy to pay 0.1 cent to get a sign-up. :-)

And we like their simple "API" -- no icky SOAP, just a GET to a URL.

Ah, all this time I thought you had to buy the whole database.

Which service was that specifically?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com