Hostip.info is a warehouse for user submitted IP Geolocation data. We have some very reputable users that supply our database with a steady stream of accurate data, so we're confident enough to use this database in production ourselves.


I've gotten quite a few requests to offer a fully populated database of IP Address Locations, etc. The following have been generously mirrored for us:

hostip_current.sql.gz

The jury is still out on whether this is the best way to do it. However, we have just begun mirroring using rsync so we can offer daily updates to the database. Plus, there are now several formats to choose from in the rsync area (MySQL, BDB, CSV). Note: we are actively looking for rsync mirrors so please shoot us an email if you're interested!

rsync://hostip.info::hostip - Main Mirror
rsync://hostip.consolut.com::hostip - Germany (Courtesy www.consolut.com)
rsync://conscience-it.de::hostip - Germany (Courtesy Conscience-it.de)
rsync://hostip.vroute.net/hostip - Frankfurt am Main, Germany
rsync://rsync.labby.co.uk/hostip.info/ - London, UK
rsync://hostip.rerouted.info/data - New York, US (Courtesy Nullamatix.com/)

Below are a few of our super-helpful mirrors that have done the rsync for you:

Wayne State University: (http | ftp)
labby.co.uk: (http://rsync.labby.co.uk/hostip.info/)

Please don't use this as a leech service. If you plan on doing daily updates - leave the copy around so rsync can do it's job and only transfer the changed bytes. Let it do what it's good at :) What this means: run the command below and keep the files around and just sync them for updates instead of deleting them all after each run...

rsync -avz --progress [pick from an rsync URL above] ./

This all is quite a bit of effort, and is aimed towards the programmer and those that want to integrate the public IP database into their application (or study it). For casual use, please use the API which requires no installation on your part. All we ask is a link to the site so others can see what www.hostip.info is all about.

The process is fairly simple assuming you've used MySQL before. You'll need to set up the database to allow your user access to create tables, or you can log in as root (not recommended :-).

The updates are generated once per month, on a random day in the month. If you want to grab monthly updates, please do so on the 3rd day of the month. This is a randomly allocated day, and will help spread the load throughout the month.

Please remember that this is a free service, and if everyone connects to the server on the 1st of the month and blindly downloads the latest update whether it's changed or not, you're abusing our generously donated mirrors and resources. Please use the day above. The internet was born in a spirit of sharing. Don't spoil it.

There's not much of a publicly available API to interact with the database directly. We're working on migrating the whole database to a new structure so we're not spending all that much time developing an 'api' per se, except for the Online IP Address Lookup API since that should remain relatively constant.