What services can I used to find a user's location based on their IP address?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37015

  •  09-06-2019
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Question

If you need to locate a user based on their IP address, what services are available (free and not free services are fine)?

P.S. I understand that some users use proxies etc., that means the result is not 100% accurate. That's ok.

Was it helpful?

Solution

Most geolocation services allow you to download a database full of IP Address to city or country maps. Some also provide web service apis for free (limited number of requests) or a paid subscription.

MaxMind has one such service that you can use which is free to determine the user's location. Their minFraud service allows 500 free queries per day.

A sample for their web service in ASP

Dim objHttp, strQuery
strQuery = "http://geoip1.maxmind.com/a?l=" & license_key & _
    "&i=" & ipaddress
set objHttp = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP")
objHttp.open "GET", strQuery, false
objHttp.send
Response.Write objHttp.ResponseText
Set objHttp = Nothing

They also offer APIs for determing credit card fraud probability based on location, card number, etc, in their paid version.

Another service is ip2location. John Millikin

Also, IPLigence offers 50 free queries a day.

For .NET Coders, there is the IPAdressExtensions module (open source, free and no web service required) purekrome

More info about geolocation is available on wikipedia.

OTHER TIPS

It's also worth noting that MaxMind allow you to download their geolocation database as a CSV file:

Easy -> I made a .NET extension method a while back. It's all wrapped up in a single DLL that u can use and reference. it doesn't require ANY WEB SERVICE or 3rd party external API call.

it's also free.

it's also open source. blah blah blah.

Enjoy!

It's called IPAddressExtensions and it's on Codeplex.

I have used hostip.info to grab client location informaion when forms are submitted on some of my aspx pages. Here is a blog entry I wrote on it a while back www.fencerowproductions.com

Geolocation with ClientLocation generally works and you get it free when you use Google's JSAPI.

There was a brilliant solution using those adult ads ie. "women in YOUR_TOWN would like to 'meet' you tonight"

Somebody worked out a way to extract the location string without loading the ad.
I can't find the code, searching google for adult ads isn't terribly effective, but somebody here might remember it.

For a paid product, you could look at CountryHawk from cyScape.

I can't vouch for this product personally, but we use their BrowserHawk product for browser and connection speed detection (eg to optimise video streaming) and haven't had any problems with it.

Here's another free service: http://www.webservicex.net/WCF/ServiceDetails.aspx?SID=46

WebserviceX.NET provide quite a few different free web services.

I recommend userlocation.com. It's easy to use and affordable and it's quite accurate.

Easy intro to using MaxMinds downloadable database in PHP Geolocation

this site uses maxminds free product - its a decent showcase - http://www.ipaddress1.com/

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