Identifying country by IP address

Question

Is there a way to figure out the country name just by looking at an IP address? I mean, do countries have specific ranges of IP addresses? For example, Australia can have IP

Answer 1

Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network can now be configured to pass this information through as a header. Given Amazon's size (they're big and stable, not going anywhere) and this is configuration over code (no third-party API to learn or code to maintain), all around believe this to be the best option.

If you do not use AWS CloudFront, I'd look into seeing if your CDN has a similar header option that can be turned on. Usually the large providers are quick to push for feature parity. And if you are not using a CDN, you could put CloudFront in front of your infrastructure and simply set the origin to resolve to whatever you are currently using.

Additionally, it also makes sense to resolve this at the CDN level. Your CDN is already having to figure out geo location to route the user to the nearest content node, might as well pass this information along and not figure it out twice through a third party API (this becomes chokepoint for your app, waiting for a geo location lookup to resolve). No need to do this work twice (and the second time, arguably less resilient [e.g., 3rd party geo lookup]).

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/enhanced-cloudfront-customization/

Geo-Targeting – CloudFront will detect the user’s country of origin and pass along the county code to you in the CloudFront-Viewer-Country header. You can use this information to customize your responses without having to use URLs that are specific to each country.