Looking back at 2018 with IPinfo

2018 was a special year for IPinfo, and we hope the same is true for you and your family.

To our existing customers, we’d love to know if IPinfo played an important role in the success of your business, service, or website this year. To those of you who aren’t yet with us, we hope reading this post will give you an idea of what it’s like to partner up with the most trusted and reliable IP data and geolocation provider.

A Year in Review

Before we jump into talking about ourselves, let’s have some fun and go over a few of the important things that happened on our side of the Internet this year.

2018 World Map

Similar to how plates shift, forests grow, and ice caps melt in the real world, the geography of our internet is constantly changing.

This map shows the characteristics of IPv4 WHOIS data from the Regional Internet Registries. Each pixel in this full-size image represents a single /24 network, containing up to 256 hosts. The color of each pixel corresponds to the RIR(s) where the address space is listed.

Areas on the map are shaded with varying levels of transparency. Larger blocks of address space are more transparent, making them darker. Thus, varying shades of color indicate different-sized address blocks appearing in the data.

Some parts of the address space are listed in multiple RIRs. When this happens, new colors can form. This is especially evident in the areas labeled “Various Registries”.

Highlights of 2018

This year was filled with interesting stories, but we’ve picked out some that relate to what we deal with the most: IP addresses. If you aren’t as passionate about them as we are, here’s some of the news you may have missed:

• April: IPv4 exhaustion creeps ever closer after the RIPE NCC allocates the last of its /8 address blocks.
• August: The US Court of Appeals determines that a movie pirate cannot be legally identified by their IP address while connected to a workplace network.
• September: Telegram’s desktop client fails to protect their users’ anonymity, as revealed in a vulnerability that exposes the IP address of callers.
• October: John Mueller of Google engages with users on Twitter to let them know that the IP address associated with a backlink does not have an effect on search rankings.
• December: Slack bans users from countries under US sanctions, eventually apologizing for affecting citizens who’ve only traveled — including our very own Amir Omidi.

2018 at IPinfo

Founded in 2013, this year was our fifth in operation. We’ve spent these years expanding, evaluating, and improving our service so that we can call ourselves the best IP data provider available. We’re proud of the work we did in 2018, and we’d love to tell you why.

Growth

This year resulted in growth across the board for IPinfo — more customers, requests, and features. Our team has also expanded, now including roles in engineering, design, marketing, and customer support.

In 2018, IPinfo added more than 120k new customers. These customers rely on us as a comprehensive IP data solution to deliver the most accurate and up-to-date network, carrier, and geolocation information. For them, we now handle over 12 billion requests per month!

And, just last month, we introduced two of the most requested features for our API: hosted domains and IP address ranges. These are some of the many different sets of new data we’ll be opening up for our customers to access, continuing through 2019.

Official Libraries

At the beginning of 2018, our Developers page showed off some of the most useful third-party libraries that were available on GitHub. Since then, we’ve built a handful of our own official libraries to help make using our service as simple as possible.

In 2018, IPinfo developed client libraries for Java, Perl (CPAN), PHP (Packagist), Python (PyPi), and Ruby. We also offer Django (PyPi) and Laravel (Packagist) libraries for web frameworks. All of these are available through repositories on our GitHub page.

Each library provides installation instructions, documentation, and examples to help you get started with our API. They also add functionality like data caching and user-agent filtering.

What’s to Come

In 2019, we plan to use every resource we have to create a better experience for everyone involved. We strive to make IPinfo something that our customers, along with ourselves, can feel enthusiastic about.

Data Improvements

Although we’re constantly improving the quality and accessibility of our data, we’re looking to make a big push in 2019. One of the first things we’ll be working on in this area is allowing users to customize their API response based on specific data needs.

We’ll also be exploring ways to make utilizing our data easier. An example that we’re looking into is support for bulk WHOIS lookup.

More Libraries

Along with the many official client libraries we already provide, we’re hoping to add C#, Go, JavaScript, and R in 2019. Continuing to make integrating IPinfo’s API easier for our customers is a big priority of ours.

If you’re looking for a library that we aren’t currently maintaining, there are many pages of unofficial libraries on GitHub.

Thank You

With the new year just around the corner, we’ve made a resolution to update this blog more often. What’s yours? If it includes improving your business by customizing your user experience, maximizing your conversion rate, or analyzing your web traffic, we’d love to help out.

We’d also enjoy hearing from you. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or other feedback that you’d like to share with our team, please feel free to do so.

From everyone at IPinfo, thank you for taking the time to read through this post and we look forward to bringing you many more in 2019. Happy holidays and enjoy the new year!

IPinfo is a comprehensive IP data and API provider with flexible pricing plans to meet your business needs. We handle billions of API requests per month, serving data like IP geolocation, ASN, mobile carrier, and more. Sign up for a free account or contact our sales team to learn more.