I use https://freegeoip.net/ which gives you output in JSON, CSV or XML and has a limit of 10,000 requests per hour. The limit of 1,000 per day on this service is too low.
If you are geolocating, I would suggest spending $370 to buy the MaxMind GeoIPCity database. There's an nginx module for it and any major language will have code to run queries against it.
So something along the lines of tracking incoming requests, then doing a DNS lookup on the incoming IP? Isn't that something that something like Google Analytics could do for you? And in that case, would this be more for people who are avoiding GA?
Google Analytics can give you this data in the reports but won't allow you to get access to it in real time in your application.
Imagine you want to redirect users to the correct country page in your site. In this case you need to get access to the ip geolocation in real time. GA won't help you there.
If your goal is geo-redirection then a 3rd party service is usually a bad choice (speed + downtime). An memory geo-ip database is the best way to go - but this is usually also part of what you pay for when you buy the non-free version
It's less accurate than their commercial offering, but good enough in many cases. For ease of use, there's a nice C API (https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-c) and wrappers like pygeoip for Python.
But freegeoip's limit of 10,000 requests per hour is better than ipinfo's $200/mo plan (6,667/hr). Plus there are no limits if you run freegeoip on your own server.
Looks like no immediate fix either, which is a shame as I wanted to use it client side but (a) need SSL and (b) can't ignore Chrome (it fails on Chrome for Android latest too)..
Thanks for that! I'm building a small script which may evolve in a service and I was retrieving IP addresses using curl, this is way more clean. Thanks!
IP addresses should only be announced by one ASN at a time (regardless if that AS is multihomed or singlehomed). If that's not the case that's usually a hint of prefix hijacking.
It gets my Location wrongish here on the Gold Coast, but not too far out. We have huge suburbs though, all of the GeoIP DB's seem to think im in the wrong suburb, despite having a static IP on Telstra cable.
