Ben Dowling

Founder & CEO of IPinfo

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

We're launching @IPinfo Lite - taking some of our most essential data fields (country level geolocation and basic ASN data) and making them available completely free, without restriction, via both an unlimited API, and a download (JSON, CSV, MMDB and Parquet all available).

While IPinfo Lite only includes a subset of all of the data we offer, there's no compromise to the data quality, or the refresh rate.

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

We got most of the @ipinfo team together in Panama last week for our annual retreat. We’re fully remote and spread all over the world, so there’s something really special about getting everyone into the same place for a few days.

We talked a lot about the progress we’ve made over the last year, where we’re going next, and some of the hard problems we’re working on. We also ate lots of great food, enjoyed some good drinks, and did a bunch of fun activities, including a party on a pirate ship (boat rides are an essential ingredient of every IPinfo team retreat!). And if it wasn’t already exciting enough, Panama threw in a major earthquake on the last day. It was a great week!

Really proud of what we’ve built, the team behind it, and where we’re heading.

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@Shpigford https://t.co/IjiCxQvoxH

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

We did some really cool engineering work at @ipinfo to reduce the size of MMDB files by up to 80% with no negative impact on read performance.

We’ve been using the smaller files in production, and shipping them to customers, for the past few months. Now we’re open-sourcing mmdbshrink, a utility you can use to make your own MMDB files much smaller too.

Great write-up on how it works, where the savings come from, and how to use it on our blog: https://t.co/SmlLiGDhef

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

This is a really common misconception. That’s definitely how most legacy geolocation providers do it, but it’s not how we do things at @ipinfo - our geolocation is based on evidence and network observations, not on guesswork or outdated Whois data.

[GrapheneOS @GrapheneOS]

@BSquatF GeoIP databases are based on guessing the location of IP blocks. It's primarily based on outdated WHOIS data and the assumption that the location of the company is the location of the IP addresses. It's highly imprecise for finer-grained location than the country level.

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Join the conversation at https://t.co/9dgMGLxHqU

See the original post at https://t.co/dDA9QrfmOa

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Our VPN exit node research made the top spot on HN!

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Full report here: https://t.co/dDA9QrfmOa

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

A lot of VPNs claim they’re in 100+ countries.

So we checked.

Out of 20 major providers, only 3 actually operate in all the places they claim!

Three. Props to @windscribe, @mullvadnet and @ivpnnet

More research and results aound this coming soon!

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Just back from an incredible week in Croatia with over 50 of the @ipinfo team.

Amazing how much energy and creativity come from spending time together in person. Between the strategy sessions, boat trips, and late-night conversations, we left with new ideas, stronger connections, and a renewed sense of the opportunity ahead.

Already looking forward to the next one!

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@MrSaeid007 @reincdr And we'll very shortly be rolling out traceroute coverage for every /24

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

We now show a recently collected traceroute for every ASN and bgp prefix on our website. Real data, collected from our ProbeNet. More coming soon!

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@MrSaeid007 @reincdr That's where our traceroute data can help, showing you how the traffic gets to that /24.

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@MrSaeid007 @reincdr Yeah tags on the prefix pages is a good idea!

Definitely possible to have multiple countries per /24 though - here's one example: https://t.co/uojW63OHKa

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@DrPeering @ipinfo Thank you!

Around a million traceroutes are now available via our website. But we collect over 2Bn every week, from over 1,000 vantage points! That is a lot of data!

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@MrSaeid007 @reincdr It's also on the website, and the CLI

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

@MrSaeid007 @reincdr We already do that.

See https://t.co/cHeMdVVD8N for anycast ASNs, and we include an anycast flag for IPs in in our API

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Example taken from https://t.co/tZqgtMdIJk

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

We now show the SSID and Airport info for major airport public WiFi IPs on the @ipinfo website - eg. https://t.co/8Va9wgljG9

[Ben Dowling @coderholic]

Paul has had an incredible impact at IPinfo over the past 3 years as COO, but we’re just getting started. Couldn’t be more excited for this next chapter, with us both as Co-CEOs.

[IPinfo – IP Data Provider @ipinfo]

Leadership Update: We’re excited to announce that Paul Heywood has been appointed Co-CEO, joining Founder and Co-CEO Ben Dowling as we continue to build, scale, and push what’s possible with IP data.

From product to go-to-market, this partnership reflects our belief that the strongest companies are built on shared vision, complementary strengths, and bold execution.

Ben shares more in this blog post → https://t.co/xQI6YybZb3