The allocation
Which organisation holds the range, taken from the regional internet registry. This is a record of fact, not an estimate.
Accurate IP geolocation is a commercial product. The free databases are wrong often enough to mislead — frequently by a continent — and a confident wrong answer about where someone is would be worse than no answer. What we do show is who the address is allocated to, which comes from the registries and is authoritative.
Which organisation holds the range, taken from the regional internet registry. This is a record of fact, not an estimate.
Where the allocation is registered, which is often not where the address is used. A block registered in the Netherlands may be in service anywhere.
The autonomous system announcing the range to the internet. Usually the network operator, and the thing to quote in a routing conversation.
Where to report traffic from this range. This is the address to use, not the provider's general support desk.
Identifying who runs a network. An address in your logs, a connection you did not expect, a mail server you want to know about: the registry tells you which organisation holds the range and how to contact them about abuse. That is the question this answers well.
Not for locating a person. Even the paid geolocation databases place an address at the level of a city at best, and often only a country — and VPNs, carrier-grade NAT and mobile networks break that routinely. Any product offering a street address from an IP is selling confidence, not accuracy.
Not for proving who did something. An address identifies a network interface at a point in time, not a person. Addresses are shared between hundreds of subscribers behind carrier NAT, reassigned constantly, and trivially routed through somewhere else.
If you need the country for a legitimate reason — tax, licensing, compliance with an export rule — the registry country here is a reasonable first indication and not a sufficient basis on its own. The usual approach is to combine it with something the user tells you, and to accept that a small share will be wrong either way.
Because we would have to guess. City-level IP geolocation comes from commercial databases built by inference and correction over time; the free versions are considerably less accurate and regularly place an address in the wrong country. Printing a city next to a pin on a map implies a precision that does not exist, and we would rather give you the allocation, which is a fact.
That field is where the allocation is registered, not where the address is in service. A provider headquartered in one country routinely uses its ranges in others. It is correct as registry data and not usable as a location.
Use the abuse contact shown here, which the registry requires the range holder to publish, and include timestamps with a timezone and the specific log lines. Sending it to the provider's sales or support address almost always goes nowhere.
An autonomous system number identifies a network that announces routes to the internet on its own behalf — an ISP, a hosting company, a large enterprise. If you are discussing a routing problem, the AS number is the useful identifier, not the address.
Yes, and the port checker will tell you what it is: enter 'me' there. This page will then show which provider holds the range you are on.
An expired certificate, a missing header or an exposed port is a finding. Knowing which of them matters on your estate, fixing them without breaking the application, and noticing the next one before a stranger does is the work. That is what we do, continuously rather than as a report.