Maxmind ISP databases: ISP-Org vs Domain Name

[Daniel Weitzenfeld]

Hi,

I'm considering buying one of the commercial Maxmind DBs to get some more info on ip addresses of site visitors.  Specifcally, I want to know what company they are browsing from.  I don't know whether to buy the ISP Organization or the domain database.  

The ISP Org database is described as:

Product Summary: Determine the Internet Service Provider, organization name, and autonomous system organization and number associated with an IP address.

The organization name is available for about 40% of corporate, government, and educational networks. In situations where we are not able to identify a specific business entity, we return the ISP name instead of the name of the business.

The domain database is described as:

Product Summary: Look up the second level domain names associated with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. The database would include "example.com" or "example.co.uk" but not the full domain "foo.example.com". The database returns a sample second level domain name from the /24 netblock to which an IP address belongs. Thus it only returns the correct data if the second level domain name is the same across the entire /24 netblock. The database contains approximately 63,000 second level domain names.

Given that I can easily get organization from domain, which of these would give me wider coverage?  Has anyone paid for these dbs, and if so, how do they like them? 

Thanks,

Dan

[Yali Sassoon]

Hi Dan,

We buy both for our own internal use at Snowplow.

In our experience the Organization database is the one to go for: it appears to have better coverage i.e. values set when the corresponding domain database is null whereas there aren't cases when the domain database provides a domain and there isn't a corresponding value in the organization you could have inferred the domain from.

It's a super useful dataset!

HTH,

Yali