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.
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: ipinfo.io/blog/how-made-mmdb…
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not how we do things at @ipinfo - our geolocation is based on evidence and network observations, not on guesswork or outdated Whois data.
Replying to @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 It's primarily based on outdated WHOIS data and the assumption that the location of the company is the location of the IP addresses.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.
Join the conversation at news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
See the original post at ipinfo.io/blog/vpn-location-…
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!
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!
Replying to @MrSaeid007 @reincdr
That's where our traceroute data can help, showing you how the traffic gets to that /24.
Replying to @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: ipinfo.io/ips/104.44.36.0/24
Replying to @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!
Replying to @MrSaeid007 @reincdr
It's also on the website, and the CLI
Replying to @MrSaeid007 @reincdr
We already do that.
See ipinfo.io/tags/anycast for anycast ASNs, and we include an anycast flag for IPs in in our API
Example taken from ipinfo.io/AS7922/76.16.0.0/1…
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!
We now show the SSID and Airport info for major airport public WiFi IPs on the @ipinfo website - eg. ipinfo.io/198.134.98.50
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.
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 → ipinfo.io/blog/introducing-i…















