Re: OT: Database of IP locations?
Re: OT: Database of IP locations?
- Subject: Re: OT: Database of IP locations?
- From: Freek Dijkstra <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 09:56:06 +0100
Dan Saul wrote:
I am trying to do a map of where people are when they are located to
my server. Doing a Google searched led me to some products that may
have been of help if they were not expensive.
So my question is, does anyone have or know of a way to get the
location of users?
There are a number of databases available which do exactly this thing,
both commercially and freely available.
However, all these database are maintained by third parties, and not by
ARIN/RIPE/APNIC, who do maintain the authorative WHOIS database, which
unfortunately does only contain the netblock owners, not the
geographical location where the netblock is used.
This means that most databases are incorrect, in particular when a
netblock is reassigned. For example, www.ip-to-location.com greets me by
telling me I'm located in "United States, Missouri, Saint Louis", while
this morning I was rather sure I am located in the Netherlands, Utrecht
(a completely different continent; my IP is 145.99.200.84, see for
yourself). So even the commercial providers of these services are
sometimes far off.
That said, the information is often a good educated guess. Just remember
it is a guess. It highly depends on what you want to do with the
information For example, doing visitor analysis of your visitors
afterward, or if you want to give a visitor a personalized greeting
based on their geographic location when they visit your website. If it
is the latter, you may as well use the language information that the
browser is sending rather then the geographic location.
You can find these type of databases or services for example by using
Google ("IP addresses" "geographic location") or by finding services,
like providers of site statistics or by downloading one of those
programs which do a graphical traceroute (showing a map of the earth
with lines), and see where they get there data from.
It will depend on your specific needs what is best for you: do you need
the information off-line, on-line, real-time, do you need IPv4 only or
also IPv6, is price or accuracy more important, etc.
Kind regards,
Freek Dijkstra
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