
Ask HN: Best IP Geolocation Database or Service? - jfaucett
Hey HN,
I'm building an app for a Client and I need a good database or service that lets me determine a users location based on their IP address. Right now I'm considering Maxmind GeoIP but I'd like to have something better, just can't seem to find it. I don't care if its free or cost money, the main thing is that its highly relaiable, regularly updated, and maintained.<p>Thanks in advance!
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volpav
At my company we use IP2Location (<http://www.ip2location.com>). They offer
several databases with different data (from basic "IP-address to country" to
quite comprehensive ones). You can get a DB as a CSV or binary file (in latter
case the driver is required which also costs some money). The database is
updated almost every month and you get free downloads.

In my home project I wanted to save some money so just bought the CSV file,
wrote a tool that converts it to a binary representation (~1GB) and a driver
(.NET) that can find records very quickly.

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HarshaThota
<http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/> may be worth a shot.

Don't know how accurate the data is or how often it's updated, but we've used
it before without any issues. I will note though that the geolocation
functionality was a secondary piece in our software, so we weren't really
concerned with accuracy of the data.

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bryanlarsen
Is this just one of those "dumb customer requirements"? At least for me,
geocoding-by-ip gives a result that is wrong by about 250 miles.

Why not just use HTML5 geolocation? You'll get much better results if the user
grants you permission, and if you don't get that permission, you probably
shouldn't know the location anyways... HTML5 geolocation is really easy to
use.

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jfaucett
geolocation works good for mobile, but on the desktop its pretty annoying, you
get a popup that you have to confirm which most users aren't used to, plus its
javascript so you can't do server side stuff before you return your content
(or in my case, redirect the user to a country specific version of the website
for the online shop).

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mihirs
If you're writing it in PHP, you could install the GeoIP PECL extension
(<http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.geoip.php>).

If not just use Maxmind GeoIP. I've never heard any complaints and its updated
frequently.

~~~
jfaucett
Thanks, I just went with GeoIP, it looks like that's about all there is. Makes
me wonder, it seems like this good be a pretty good API service someone could
offer, do it a lot cleaner more modern, better docs and bindings etc.

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idont
We use <http://www.maxmind.com> for our custom abuse detection system (which
is using geolocation as a signal).

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Intermediate
Check out <http://www.wipmania.com/>

