Build Your Own IP Geolocation Setup Without the SaaS Tax in an Afternoon | Hacker News Reader

Build Your Own IP Geolocation Setup Without the SaaS Tax in an Afternoon

kerochan.lol

3 pointspetee6 comments

I work at IPinfo. We offer unlimited free requests through the IPinfo Lite API. By unlimited, I mean millions of requests per day. The free API provides country and ASN data.

As far as I know, GeoLite2 does not have city-level data for a large number of IP addresses. Even when it does, the city-level accuracy can be quite poor.

So I'd suggest just using our API and pointing to the capital city. That would also remove the need to pay for a VM.

There are a few reasons one could chose to not go with saas, but this is someone's small project which was neat; and upgradable to any GeoIP db, I might add...you guys don't need to advertise yourself everytime someone shares it -- https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1oa1pdh/made_a_...

We do not comment to advertise. We participate in IP geolocation discussions because there is a lot of misinformation in this space, and we feel a responsibility to provide accurate information publicly.

In this case, the recommendation was for a free product that requires no setup and no VM cost. The opposite of a sales pitch.

Frankly it reads exactly as a pitch - who you are, why you're the best, and whats wrong with whats presented, followed by 'so use us'.

And there was no misinformation here. You even use the lack of City data in GeoLite as a negative, yet you only offer City as paid. Personally, I'm already paying a VM cost, and I can get 1uS answers hosting locally, so this is a valid solution.

Im trying to be honest with you because I found the project on reddit, where you commented, only to share it here and find the same immediate reply with no constructive input to their project. Do you offer a community or offline version of your db for local use?

The project directly references us, so it is only fair we provide more context.

The idea of a pitch means that there is some sort of price attached to it, which IPinfo Lite does not have. In fact, it is designed as commercially permissive as possible.

According to MaxMind, they offer a variety of databases with different pricing tiers of accuracy. Geolite2 as a database service is free but its accuracy is compromised by design. If you want a more accurate version of their database, you have to pay for the GeoIP2 database. Now, this applies to country-level data as well. They have a free, accuracy-compromised country database, and then they have their database with better accuracy available for purchase.

We would rather not compromise on accuracy at all and provide the highest possible accurate country-level data for free. We do not have a compromised accuracy variant of any database. We sell the city database and offer the country database for free to anyone.

There are three layers of cost here with a self-hosted project. You pay for the VM, you set up the project, and you have to maintain it. So, for some folks, the API service makes sense because the cost maintaining the infrastructure for it is on us.

We offer an offline version of the IPinfo Lite database for download: https://ipinfo.io/developers/ipinfo-lite-database

Business oppotunity --- provide this as a service for a more reasonable fee.

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