Ip Address Geo Location tools?

Question

Hi,

I am looking for a Rest API where i can submit an IP address and get something like long/lat or street address back. I have about 300k IP addresses to look up, and would love a free service, or one that I can test and verify before investing in anything.

Any suggestions?

JoeS · Answer

Some good comments in the above.

The other thing to add as well is IP's are dynamic, which adds the extra complexity that you'd want to do a time based IP lookup.

As when a machine/router is restarted it could perhaps have a different IP.

Thus this is usually why it's a paid for service to achieve.

I have used NordVPN in a previous role with some success.

That lastly leaves another point I'll add, is that many business IP's will come from one location as well, so it will look like there is loads of traffic from a single IP, when in fact it's many machines behind it.

Ben_H · Answer

Hi @Dan5

There are a few IP geolocation services such as https://www.ip2location.com/

They usually will have a free tier that you can query up to about 10000 times a day.

The problem, as @jrgo  has pointed out is that the locations are approximate, and you will typically find that you get slightly (and sometimes significantly) different results between services. You may get approximate accuracy to a large town or city but that's about it as far as I know.

Services like this will often make their databases available to download and use for free - this is usually not their "most" accurate set though, and you have to build a process to do the geocoding. This is the approach I take as for me I only really need country and rough geographical region and don't want to be limited on requests.

Regard,

Ben

jrgo · Answer

Hi @Dan5

I don't think that level of detail for who an IP is assigned to is information that's publicly or privately available. I think the closest you can probably get some info for ISP that hosts/owns the IP from a WHOIS search.