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Asked: 2026-06-15T13:27:07+00:00

Trying to decide the best solution for GeoIP look ups. The options seem to

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Trying to decide the best solution for GeoIP look ups.

The options seem to be:
1. Download a premium database and do lookups
2. Download a free database and do lookups
3. Hit a free web API
4. Hit a paid web API.

We are going to have to do this on user log in, so it will happen frequently.

An important question whether IP address locations change, and if so, how often. For example, we could build our own database out of a free web API, storing every IP location it returns us, but that would only be feasible if they are relatively persistent.

Also, the paid database we’re looking at updates once per month, which, depending on if/how often these change, may not be enough.

Thanks!

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  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no guarantee on how persistent IPs are for a certain location. There are actually companies which act as brokers for IPv4 addresses since we’re starting to run low on them. The 18.0.0.0/8 that MIT owns has probably been in one place for 30 years. Others have probably moved around a lot more.

    As far as maintaining a local cache of addresses from some kind of web API I’d reccommend against it. If you do a 1:1 IP->lat/long table then you’re talking a total of 2^32 entries at say 50 bytes each = 200GB. Obviously these could be compressed into subnets and such but now you’re starting to do the work that the GeoIP companies are very good at and have a significant head start. The free IP->Country database that ships with Debian is only 5MB installed on my machine.

    From a programmer productivity standpoint it’s going to be difficult to beat a downloadable database with a client side library for speed and reliability.

    MaxMind has free databases for IP->Country and IP->City but you have to put a notice on your website/product like “This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com” That’s more of a business decision than a technical one.

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