I'd like to point out that the things he says he's doing instead of marketing are, in fact, marketing. It's "guerilla" marketing, and it's being paid for with the writer's time. Nothing wrong with that, just don't confuse "marketing" with "advertising".
The author does not say how much does maintaining the service cost and what is the long term plan. As others have referred to already, a similar existed before and ended for a simple reason – no point in maintaining it with constant loss and no clear revenue plan.
What it does is show where every asset on a web page is loaded from. It allows you to visualize how many different requests go into building just one web page. While it's gotten much better, the Houston Chronicle (https://chron.com) used to make about 500 individual requests to build its home page. It's down to about 125.
It's best to run it across two different monitors, with IP Request Mapper on one monitor and your "normal" browser window on another. Then enter any URL and watch the map start populating based on the geolocating every request made by the page.
But it's projects like ipinfo.io that make these other things possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that...kudos to you, coderholic.
Happy user here. My GF came up to me and asked if I could somehow get country names for the ip addresses she had of her survey respondants. I Googled and found this neat little API. True, I could have downloaded the raw databases from elsewhere and worry about the SQL I need, whether the data is recent or ancient or even correct. I decided it was an overkill for my need, and just used this API in a throttled(1 req/s) mode and left it overnight. If I need this IP to Location need again, I'd happily pay for this API.
- Database needs to be distributed to your servers
- Database can become out of date easily
- Database lookup requires going to local disk and having a relatively fast access path/cache for lookups
- In general, a local database requires a large amount of effort compared to just running a curl in your PHP code.
If you are actually going to use a database, the proper solution does not look like "put it on your webservers" anyway, it looks like "put it on a separate service with a fast caching layer" etc etc. So in other words, the proper solution to decouple yourself from a 3rd party API is to... build a 1st party API.
In other words, not a 20 minute job. For small shops, a quick curl during the page load is a 20 minute job.
Do you think free IP DB providers insert "fictitious entries" [1] to identify breach of TOS like this, similar to what happened between Google/Bing a few years ago [2]?
yeah, especially because "[they] built the API in a few hours".
having hosers abuse your free geoip service listed off the first hit from google is nice but the data being provided can't just be "hacked together" :P.
That's interesting. It's almost exactly the same. I did a trademark search, and although "Podio" is registered as a word mark, the logo design is not registered. So IPInfo is probably in the clear, but they may want to consider a new logo.
I've been running https://jsonip.com for years. Been serving millions of requests a day for most of that time. Doesn't really show up in searches well because it's just an API.
I'm employing a similar strategy for my library https://github.com/joelgriffith/navalia as I couldn't find any solution to manage headless chrome (plus the API for that protocol is pretty heavy).
Building for what folks want, even developers, is so obvious that I think we often forget about it. It's also not as glamorous as self driving cars or rockets, so gets discredited easily.
Kudos to you guys for building this. There is always a lot of scepticism from people on "why would anyone pay for this" . Reality is not everyone has the time or resources to build their own kit. There are literally 1000s of businesses on the internet that that are in the business of selling "time" or timesavers and removing the risk of maintenance, ongoing support.
Keep improving this and with the rise of web personalization, the demand will continue to grow.
Congrats. I m not sure but ipinfo could be very interesting to startups and programmers. So a good idea could be writing attractive articles and posting them on HN and Reddit programming and some other subreddits. That would bring more customers with zero marketing.
[+] [-] Tloewald|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smokybay|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856
[+] [-] coderholic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superasn|8 years ago|reply
1) more accurate details
2) fraud protection, if the ip is known for fraud or spamming
3) increased rate limits, etc
Just the top of my head s.. I'm sure you i can think of many more..
[+] [-] imron|8 years ago|reply
Since the OP in this case only has a limited free version, I don't think it's going to be an issue.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] westoque|8 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-inspector/j...
I solely marketed it at Stack Overflow and was getting upvotes and that was all my marketing.
https://superuser.com/questions/244062/how-do-i-view-add-or-...
Also a big factor there are good reviews. When users like your project/product, they will market it for you.
[+] [-] davidivadavid|8 years ago|reply
What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice faster?
When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities."
[+] [-] rickduggan|8 years ago|reply
What it does is show where every asset on a web page is loaded from. It allows you to visualize how many different requests go into building just one web page. While it's gotten much better, the Houston Chronicle (https://chron.com) used to make about 500 individual requests to build its home page. It's down to about 125.
It's best to run it across two different monitors, with IP Request Mapper on one monitor and your "normal" browser window on another. Then enter any URL and watch the map start populating based on the geolocating every request made by the page.
But it's projects like ipinfo.io that make these other things possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that...kudos to you, coderholic.
[+] [-] reacharavindh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babuskov|8 years ago|reply
I mean, you might spend 20 minutes more to set it up, but you are safe from having to rely on 3rd party service.
Anyway, kudos to coderholic for creating this and sharing the story.
[+] [-] gfodor|8 years ago|reply
- Database needs to be distributed to your servers
- Database can become out of date easily
- Database lookup requires going to local disk and having a relatively fast access path/cache for lookups
- In general, a local database requires a large amount of effort compared to just running a curl in your PHP code.
If you are actually going to use a database, the proper solution does not look like "put it on your webservers" anyway, it looks like "put it on a separate service with a fast caching layer" etc etc. So in other words, the proper solution to decouple yourself from a 3rd party API is to... build a 1st party API.
In other words, not a 20 minute job. For small shops, a quick curl during the page load is a 20 minute job.
[+] [-] timdorr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt2000|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scirra_Tom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maddyboo|8 years ago|reply
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
2: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/02/google.bing.sting/ind...
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phillmv|8 years ago|reply
having hosers abuse your free geoip service listed off the first hit from google is nice but the data being provided can't just be "hacked together" :P.
[+] [-] ribrars|8 years ago|reply
I read that you use Elastic Beanstalk for your server config, but I wanted to ask: 1. What programming language did you use?
2. What, if any, configuration did you have to do to the Elastic Beanstalk config to deal with network spikes and autoscaling?
Thanks!
[+] [-] skynode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderholic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XCSme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larsnystrom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SirLJ|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WA|8 years ago|reply
- I somehow can remember that domain. I don't have to google "my ip" and dig through weird domains that change all the time
- The design is clean and simple. Not too many information, no ads, loads fast.
[+] [-] QUFB|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|8 years ago|reply
As an added bonus, you can get all local IPv4 with:
[+] [-] secure|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinbowman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heipei|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unchaotic|8 years ago|reply
- https://db-ip.com/api - https://ipapi.co - https://freegeoip.net - ipinfodb.com - https://www.iplocation.net - http://neutrinoapi.com - http://www.ip2location.com - https://www.telize.com
and a few dozen more. I wonder if collectively they are serving over a few billion requests per day. Microservices & API culture FTW !
[+] [-] geuis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigmi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firloop|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11010856
[+] [-] mrskitch|8 years ago|reply
Building for what folks want, even developers, is so obvious that I think we often forget about it. It's also not as glamorous as self driving cars or rockets, so gets discredited easily.
Sound points though
[+] [-] fusionflo|8 years ago|reply
Keep improving this and with the rise of web personalization, the demand will continue to grow.
[+] [-] kasbah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
The answers on the SO question https://stackoverflow.com/q/409999/325521 that OP refers to (in his blog post)
also has another answer using freegeoip.net => https://stackoverflow.com/a/16589641/325521
From the comments on this answer (not OP's answer linking to his API), it seems like freegeoip is not all that reliable (i.e. it's down a lot).
Funnily enough, 1 of the comments on this answers links to another free service, called "freegeoip2" which seems to work just fine as of right now.
[+] [-] diminish|8 years ago|reply
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ipinfo.io