Hey all,
FunnelFlux is one of the few trackers that uses DigitalElement databases for resolving IP --> country, region, city as well as ISP and mobile carrier.
On self-hosted systems you simply won't get this because of licensing issues. We are however able to provide this for users of our Managed FunnelFlux systems.
In the past, our self-hosted users retrieved country/city/region data from local Maxmind databases, with ISP/carrier being looked up remotely (which slows down redirects, hence why we didn't want to do this for geo-data). The free Maxmind databases aren't great and most trackers out there use this + some other DBs (e.g. IP2location) to give you geo-data.
But, that's now over.
We have rolled out a second-generation network of DigitalElement servers and while doing this we realised most of our self-hosted customers use Vultr as a server provider. So, what if we hosted our DigitalElement servers in every Vultr datacentre so that self-hosted customers could access this data quickly, while still being remote?
That's what we did.
The result?
Most Vultr servers will connect to our DigitalElement servers and get the data they need in <5 ms. That's faster than what the Maxmind databases tended to do anyway (and they were local!). No more slow redirects when using country/ISP data in redirect conditions, while still getting the industry-leading data.
If your self-hosted server isn't with Vultr, don't worry, our coverage is pretty wide so the remote lookups shouldn't have much of a performance penalty, and the better data is worth it.
Here's where our servers are:
For those of use (including myself) that are less tech-saavy - here's a TL;DR version from zeno on the benefits of this upgrade: