Commercial data manual

Q: What is the coverage of the offline data?

The IP coverage is 100%, meaning any valid IP (except unallocated ones) has region info. For the detailed statistics of the core fields' coverage, see Commercial data coverage.

Q: Some IP locations look wrong — what should I do?

No offline location database is 100% accurate. Even a 1% error rate means 4.29 million IPs have wrong location info — and reaching 99% is still extremely challenging (I am not sure any team can do it), because IP allocation keeps changing. So the advice is: your product design must take wrong locations into account and handle them properly.

Q: Why is the payment entity a third-party service provider?

Updating IP data is high-cost work — professional things should be left to professional teams. Although the IP2REGION community keeps optimizing the data, it is still built on the raw data of partners. The reason payment goes through the third-party partner's entity is that the purchaser's actual counterparty in the transaction is the data partner. Whether the issue lies with the community itself or with the cooperation with the vendor, the data service provider is still obligated to keep providing the purchaser with the data services of the transaction.

Q: When is the data updated, and how do we update it?

Sign in to the community and go to Data services -> Offline data to see the update time of your service and its update rules. After each data update is completed, you can either download the data manually to apply the update, or integrate automatic updates as described in Automatic updates.

1. Data sources

The commercial offline data is provided by the ip2region community, optimized on top of base data from partner vendors. Payment and invoices are issued by the partner's entity, while the community provides the complete online purchase and data services.

Order and user identity data from the purchase (account ID, phone number) is also synced to the corresponding vendor platform. Your account identity can also sign in on the third-party platform and use the raw data they provide.

2. Data versions

The IPv4 commercial data comes in three versions: V4 Base/V4 Advanced/V4 Pro

The IPv6 commercial data comes in three versions: V6 Base/V6 Advanced/V6 Pro

The three versions of V4/V6 have exactly the same field structure. The differences among the three versions are as follows:

Field difference: Compared with Base, Advanced adds one more ASN field, and Pro adds two more fields: ASN and network scenario.
District coverage: Compared with Base, Advanced and Pro have about 10% higher coverage on the district field, while the district coverage of Advanced and Pro is the same.

3. Frequently asked questions

01. What is the coverage of the offline data?

The IP coverage is 100%, meaning any valid IP (except unallocated ones) has region info. For the detailed statistics of the core fields' coverage, see Commercial data coverage.

02. How accurate is the offline data?

The community honestly cannot provide a number for this. Even if you gave us an IP location pair, technically we could not judge whether it is right or wrong — accuracy itself has no standard to measure against. So the community recommends that you test repeatedly on the lookup demo page to confirm. If you have many IPs with confirmed location info and need to verify our commercial data, you can contact the administrator via the contact information at the bottom of the page for batch export.

03. Some IP locations look wrong — what should I do?

No offline location database is 100% accurate. Even a 1% error rate means 4.29 million IPs have wrong location info — and reaching 99% is still extremely challenging (I am not sure any team can do it), because IP allocation keeps changing. So the advice is: your product design must take wrong locations into account and handle them properly.

04. I am using the open-source data now. Can I upgrade to the commercial data simply by overwriting the existing xdb file?

The community provides three XDB variants by default. After overwriting the xdb file, depending on your usage, you may still need to adjust the indexes used to read the fields, as follows:

The open-source xdb fields are: country|province|city|ISP

The Simplified variant xdb fields are: country|province|city|ISP|other fields

Let $region be the array obtained by splitting the result on |. For example, if you previously read the city as $region[2] in the open-source version, you need to change it to $region[3] for the commercial Full variant, while Standard/Simplified need no change. If you previously read the ISP as $region[3] in the open-source data, the commercial Full variant requires $region[5], the commercial Standard variant requires $region[4], and the Simplified variant needs no change.

If you need to read the other commercial data fields, just use the corresponding index: print the $region array, then refer to the data description of the corresponding data version to locate them.

05. Why is the payment entity a third-party service provider?

Updating IP data is high-cost work — professional things should be left to professional teams. Although the IP2REGION community keeps optimizing the data, it is still built on the raw data of partners. The reason payment goes through the third-party partner's entity is that the purchaser's actual counterparty in the transaction is the data partner. Whether the issue lies with the community itself or with the cooperation with the vendor, the data service provider is still obligated to keep providing the purchaser with the data services of the transaction.

06. Can I get an invoice after purchase?

Yes. After the order is paid, submit your information directly via Order management -> Order list -> Apply for invoice to request an electronic invoice. Both enterprise/individual and general/special VAT invoices are supported.

07. Why do the offline data and the lookup demo page show different results?

The offline data is updated once a month, while the online demo data is updated more frequently. All changes in between cannot be synced before the next update, so the results differ somewhat — this is an inherent drawback of the offline data use case.

08. What does the monthly update mean?

It means the offline data is updated once a month. No matter how many times you download before the next data update, you get the same data. For the exact update time, check the update rules of the data services.

09. When is the data updated, and how do we update it?

Sign in to the community and go to Data services -> Offline data to see the update time of your service and its update rules. After each data update is completed, you can either download the data manually to apply the update, or integrate automatic updates as described in Automatic updates.

10. What happens after the purchased data service expires?

What you purchase with the offline data is mainly a data update service. After data service expiry, you can no longer download the updated data, but the data you have already downloaded can be used permanently.

11. Are there any usage restrictions on the purchased offline data?

There are no restrictions on use by the purchasing entity or yourself, but you must not resell the data directly or authorize a different entity/individual to use it.