Country IP Blocks™

As mentioned in an earlier post, Country IP Blocks is preparing to move to a paid services model. This move is intended to help us meet our financial obligations and provide our hundreds of thousands of visitors a better experience.

We are in the process of completing scripts that will only be accessible to paying members.

In our top-level service plan users will be able to log in to their control panel, make selections of formats, countries, continents and maybe even Regional Internet Registries and store these selections under their user credentials. Your results will be provided to you within your control panel, but, more importantly, your customized Access Control Lists will also be delivered to you via dynamic URL. We store your choices and then automatically create your data each time we update our database. You can then remotely access your data without signing in on the website.

Premium memberships will include access to IPv4 and IPv6 data, dynamic bogon data, database search capabilities, including searching for data changes by date.

Our premium members will also be able to aggregate their IPv4 data in IP Range Format. This will dramatically reduce the size of your ACLs and allow for a much smaller footprint in your firewalls.

Premium members may even be given an option to be notified when data changes within specific country lists.

We have lots of good things in store for you, but before we go too far we really need your input. What can we do to improve? Tell us what you want us to provide. Ask questions. Help us help you by letting us know your needs and how we may be able to incorporate solutions into our upcoming and new membership plans.

Please drop us a line at connecting@countryipblocks.net. We value your questions and input. Please don’t hesitate to talk with us.

We are anticipating 2,000,000 visitors to Country IP Blocks during the month of January and somewhere between 30-50 million for all of 2012. With all these visitors and downloads we have noticed certain websites redistributing our data and in some cases even charging others for the use of our data. This is a violation of our Terms of Service.

After discussions with others in the tech and security industries we believe it is time for us to stop subsidizing and start charging a fair price for the use of our data. A good friend at one of the leading firewall security websites mentioned that donations will only ever play a small part in the income of our services, followed by sponsors and ultimately paid services.

We are working on a new model of services and we would like to get your feedback.

Here is what is currently under consideration:

All users of Country IP Blocks data will be required to sign up for the service. This includes our free services.

Free Services:

Free services will include once a month updates. This means that you can download the data anytime during the month but this data will only be updated once a month.  For example, if you downloaded data on January 30, 2012 it will include data accurate as of January 1, 2012 (approximately). Other companies are charging $12 a month ($144 a year for this service).

Paid services:

Plan one: Weekly updates of data. You will have access to data that will never be more than one week old. You will need to login to get the data. Cost: $79 per year.

Plan two: Daily updates of data. Data will be the most current available at the time. You will need to login to access the data. Cost: $119 per year and does not include our full list of Bogons or the ability to Aggregate networks.

Plan three: This is our preferred plan and includes: Daily updates of data. Data will be the most current data available at the time. You can choose a dynamic data list, choose your countries and formats and we will create this data for you each time we update the database. You will have access to the full bogon list and can use our Aggregation Scripts to output data in an aggregated IP range format. This means your lists can be as little as 10% of their normal size. Once you create your data you will be able to access your data through secure dynamic links. In other words, when you connect to Country IP Blocks you will pull your own customized data through your specific dynamic URL(s). You won’t need to login. You can set it, forget it and we will do the rest for you. Cost: only $159 per year.

All plans assume you will be using our data on one server or one website. Data cannot be reproduced or redistributed without our express written permission. We will be making some special exceptions for our sponsor(s).

We believe the above plans will give us the continued opportunity to provide our high quality data at reasonable rates, as well as help stop the financial strain caused by providing all our services for free.

We want and need your input before we implement these plans, but changes are coming.

Drop us a line at connecting@countryipblocks.net to let us know your thoughts.

Thank you for using Country IP Blocks.

If you need your Country IP Blocks network lists by continent, we have great news for you!

Country IP Blocks has Network Aggregation Lists by Continent Available for testing. These are only available in IP range at the moment. For example:

3.0.0.0-4.255.255.255
6.0.0.0-9.255.255.255
11.0.0.0-13.255.255.255
15.0.0.0-23.23.255.255
23.32.0.0-23.67.255.255
24.0.0.0-24.30.223.255
24.31.0.0-24.41.95.255

These lists aggregate all contiguous networks in each continent, reducing the size of the data by up to ninety-percent.

We will make these available for testing for one week. Please provide us with some feedback. And if you like what Country IP Blocks is doing in providing this data please make a donation. Thanks.

Here are the test lists:

Africa

Asia

Europe

North America

South America

Oceania

If you use our services please consider donating to Country IP Blocks. Your donations help us to improve and stay in business.