You’re a smart guy, figure it out!

Was working on a project where a client wanted to track users’ physical locations as their register on theirs site. Looked around for possible solutions and found 2 options: hosting ip2location database yourself or access via a web service.

The choice really depends on your needs:

• If performance is a concern or internet connection is not always available, hosting database is the way to go
• The downside is that you will need to updated that database rather frequently to keep it up to date
• Based on my requirements of under 500 lookups a month, I decided to go with a web service solution. One big plus is that neither my client nor I have to worry about updating the database.

The same vendor (IP2LOCATION) provides both solutions and it looks like they have all the bases covered by providing examples and API across all popular languages. Web Service itself is extremely simple, so integration was absolutely painless.

• Information about web services
• Code Samples
• Database Products
• Code samples

Prices for web service are rather reasonable as well: $199/year for up to 500 requests/month, $399 gets you 2000 and it goes up from there.

The good news is that you can also get a free license for up to 90 requests per month.