AWStats country accuracy

[Compworld]

Anyone know how reliable the country stats in AWStats?

[makemetop]

It will all depend on how often they update their IP lookup tables. Enterprise analytics systems do it on at least a monthly basis and can give details down to the nearest zip code/post code in some instances! Scary stuff - but I have no idea how often AWStats does their update - or from where/how they pull their data.

There are several 3rd party vendors that supply extensive and frequently updated databases to analytics companies (amongst others).

If they do keep up to date, and it is very easy to do for analytics vendors, then it should be pretty accurate. I have seen few false positives in the applications I have looked at where location identification is important.

[lammert]

AWStats doesn't have its own country database. It uses the GeoIP database from MaxMind. MaxMind has two different versions of its country database. The free version is less accurate than the paid one. For the monthly updated paid country version they claim 99.8% accuracy. The free Geolite version is claimed to be 99.5% accurate.

[makemetop]

I actually use the paid API from MaxMind for our own use and it seems to be very good indeed. If AWStats are using the same thing then I would vouch for the accuracy of their figures.