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Show HN: Lookup details about any IP address (iplist.cc)
13 points by iplist 2654 days ago
5 comments

Detecting website visitor locations can be useful to keep track of login patterns or other metrics. For a popular web application I needed to save the IP address and visitor country upon login. If a login attempt was made from an unknown location (or TOR) I could ask the user for a second (or third) factor authentication.

There are plenty of services offering geo IP information and I've tried a few. I've been thoroughly disappointed. Every single paid service managed to "guess" a city and country where I came from and every single one was wrong. The services looked great but upon closer inspection I noticed an alarming amount of incorrect results when analyzing real world data.

I can do better I thought and so I've tried to create a better and free service: iplist.cc

The service is currently handling about 2k requests a minute on busy times for the last two months. The monthly bills are paid for by the other web application I'm selling so my goal is to keep iplist.cc free, as it is self sufficient for now.

Your thoughts?

Where did you source your database?
Various sources such as public internet registries, domain lists and also traceroutes.
Is the data frequently updated? If you have recency info maybe include that in the response.
A cron job is running, and currently works as follows:

- Daily: update data from internet registries

- Daily: update ASN data

- Every four hours: update TOR data

- Every minute: traceroutes (in small batches)

- Every minute: update website data: hostname/ip records (in small batches)

Source for ASN data and interet registries?
Nice ! This is something that could be listed on https://free-for.dev
Nice! Would also love if you provided a continent code (like "EU", "NA", ...)
Well, your info is not true for my IP. It should be Serbia, not Slovenia ...
doesnt seem to lookup lots of subdomain.not ready for any serious usage