When your IP shows the wrong country

How geolocation actually works

There is no authoritative mapping from an IP address to a place. Commercial databases — MaxMind, IP2Location, IPinfo, DB-IP and a dozen others — estimate it from registry records, routing data, latency measurements and whatever the network operator publishes. Each one guesses separately, which is why two sites can disagree about where you are.

Address space also moves. A block that served customers elsewhere two years ago may still be recorded that way in a database that has not been refreshed. The physical machine is in Amsterdam; the record is stale.

Check before you conclude

Look the address up in several databases rather than one site, and note that a service showing you the wrong country may be using a provider you have never heard of. Knowing which database is wrong is the whole job, because each has its own correction process.

Getting it corrected

Most providers accept correction requests from the network operator, and some from the address holder. The two that matter most, because so many services buy from them, are MaxMind and IP2Location; both have a public correction form.

Tell us as well. We publish geofeed data and registry records for our ranges, and corrections carry more weight when they come from the operator. Send support the address or range and the country it should show, and we will submit it from our side. Expect days to weeks for the databases to refresh, and longer for the services that license from them.

Why services still disagree afterwards

Streaming platforms, banks and fraud systems rarely rely on location alone. They also flag addresses that look like hosting rather than residential connections — and a dedicated server in a datacentre is exactly that, correctly identified. Correcting the country will not change that classification, because it is not an error.

If your business depends on appearing to be a residential connection, a dedicated server is the wrong tool and no amount of database correction will fix it.

What you can control

• Reverse DNS. Set it to a name that reflects your organisation. Some databases read it, and it helps every human who looks your address up. See reverse DNS.
• WHOIS and registry records. If you hold your own space, keep the country and organisation fields accurate — see bring your own IP space.
• Publish a geofeed if you have your own range. It is a simple CSV that the serious databases consume.

A note on new addresses

Any address has a history. If a newly assigned one behaves oddly — blocked by a service, listed somewhere, placed in the wrong country — tell us. We can check what we know about it and, where it is genuinely tainted, swap it. That is a quick ticket, not an argument. See also getting off a blocklist.

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Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base