At WonderProxy we’ve been helping people test their GeoIP sensitive applications since launch. It’s why we launched. Perhaps ironically it’s never been a technology we’ve used on our own website. With our upcoming re-design that’s changing.
Using GeoIP:
- How to use it
- Acquire a database
- Rebuild Apache & PHP
- Handle edge cases
Deciding how you’ll use GeoIP information will affect how much you end up spending for a GeoIP database, how often you’ll renew, and what safeguards you’ll need to put in place. Country level granularity is relatively easy to come by, city level within the US and Canada however tends to be much more expensive.
Our integration goal is to support a nice slogan, for us that’s “You’re in .., Your customers aren’t. WonderProxy: Test Globally”. We opted for Region level as opposed to City, or Country level. We felt like “Ontario” or “Texas” was more impressive than “Canada” and “United States”, but were also wary of the lower accuracy level with city rate (Telling someone they’re in Brooklyn, when they’re really in Manhatten wouldn’t inspire confidence).There’s several options available. This step was easy, we bought ours from MaxMind. We feel relatively familiar with the GeoIP data provider marketplace, and MaxMind has seemed both quite accurate and responsive to updates throughout WonderProxy’s existence. IP2Location is another provider with downloads available.
MaxMind also provides API access to its data. We’ve been leveraging this for a long time in our monitoring systems (we check all our servers to ensure they’re geo-locating correctly), but they’re all batched processes. Waiting for a remote API to return during page load, in particular for a landing page is folly. IP2Location also offers an API, as does InfoSniper. APIs work really well in batched process, or anything somehow detached from page loads.
Our initial build only required the Apache module, this way additional superglobals were provided in PHP. I can grab <?=$_SERVER['GEOIP_REGION_NAME']; ?> get someone’s location, it’s really easy. We later installed the PHP module (using the same database) to support arbitrary IP lookup within our administration systems. We also encoded the MaxMind ISO 3166 data into our application to convert country codes to names.
If you’re taking the API approach life should be easy, there’s plenty of code examples for every major API provider. If you’re using an API you also have the ability to choose different levels of granularity on the fly, full data some of the time, minimal data most of the time to save on credits.
Not every IP will have a result, it’s important to catch these and handle correctly. We’ve simply decided to test the variable and replace with “Your Office” when the lookup fails.
On the API front It’s worth spending a few minutes to make a request fail on purpose and ensure your code handles it well. I’ve had a few important daily reports fail because the API we were using was unavailable, frankly it’s embarrassing.
We've been really happy with how easy the integration has been. I've already added several new integration points throughout our administrative system (providing lookups on banned users, the IP associated with transactions, etc.). For us the integration is really supporting the slogan and looking nice, but there's plenty of practical uses like estimating shipping charges, localizing prices, and adjusting content.
