Our downloadable IP WHOIS data sets are live!
Recently, our customers have become increasingly interested in not only the APIs we provide but also the raw data that powers them. One of the major data sources behind our custom IP geolocation data is IP address WHOIS records.
To produce our geolocation data, we’ve had to become world experts at parsing and processing IP WHOIS records — both from the five Regional Internet Registries, or RIRs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC, and AFRINIC), and lesser-known sources that often go overlooked, such as RWHOIS.
We’ve been working with IP WHOIS data internally for many years. We refresh all of this data weekly, and it feeds into many of our data pipelines, such as geolocation, ASN classification, and company data.
Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re opening up access to this IP WHOIS data by making it available for download. Pricing starts at $1,000 per month for monthly updates of the parsed fields in CSV format, but custom plans are also available. Our custom plans can provide additional fields, more frequent updates, and alternative file formats.
What are RIRs?
The five Regional Internet Registries play an important role in providing the world with ongoing access to IP addresses. RIRs are allocated IPs by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). From there, the RIR serves the next level of allocation to large regional entities (like ISPs), educational institutions, large corporations, and even governments.
These are our RIRs:
- American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which serves IPs and domains to North America, including the United States, Canada, and portions of the Caribbean
- Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), which serves IPs and domains to Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East
- Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), which serves IPs and domains to Asia and the Pacific Rim
- Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry (LACNIC), which serves IPs and domains to Latin America and portions of the Caribbean
- African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), which serves IPs and domains to the African continent
These not-for-profits have created the guidelines to make IP address allocation efficient worldwide. Together, they have formed the Number Resource Organization (NRO), which assists the RIRs in coordinating technical and policy initiatives.
If you’re interested in seeing a map of the Internet’s address space, based on RIRs, check out our 2018 wrap-up post!
What is RWHOIS?
Referral WHOIS (RWHOIS) is a sister protocol to WHOIS. RWHOIS builds upon WHOIS in a scalable and hierarchical way, providing query routing and more granular information about IP address assignment.
RWHOIS was first specified by Network Solutions in 1994 (RFC 1714) and then superseded in 1997 (RFC 2167). The technical functionality that RWHOIS provides is incredibly valuable, and, as big fans of data, we’re hoping to see the adoption of this standard increase.
How much data do we have?
To answer that question simply — all of it!
At the time of publishing this, IPinfo has data from 885 RWHOIS servers. IPv4 and IPv6 ranges combined, here are the total number of rows in our data sets belonging to each RIR:
- ARIN: 3,427,796
- RIPE: 5,179,942
- APNIC: 1,111,289
- LACNIC: 430,790
- AfriNIC: 152,362
That’s over 9.3 GB of the best and most complete data of this kind that we’re offering to you! Here’s a small sample:
If you’re interested, please check out our Data Download page.
We’re constantly adding new features and updating IPinfo based on the valuable feedback and needs of our customers. If you have anything you wish to share with us, our support team will make sure that it gets noticed.
IPinfo is a comprehensive IP address 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 hosted domains. Sign up for a free account or contact our sales team to learn more.
