Question

I’m trying to get the country from which the user is browsing the website so I can work out what currency to show on the website. I have tried using the GET scripts available from: http://api.hostip.info but they just return XX when I test it.

If anyone knows any better methods please share.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try these:

http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/

http://www.ip2location.com/

Both are IP address-to-country databases, which allow you to look up the country of origin of a given IP address.

However it’s important to note that these databases are not 100% accurate. They’re a good guide, but you will get false results for a variety of reasons.

• Many people use proxying to get around country-specific blocks and filters.
• Many IP ranges are assigned to companies with large geographic spread; you’ll just get the country where they’re based, not where the actual machine is (this always used to be a big problem for tracking AOL users, because they were all apparently living in Virginia)
• Control of IP ranges are sometimes transferred between countries, so you may get false results from that (especially for smaller/less well-connected countries)

Keeping your database up-to-date will mitigate some of these issues, but won’t resolve them entirely (especially the proxying issue), so you should always allow for the fact that you will get false results.