Followup on: What’s up with BGP communities? - NANOG - lists.nanog.org
You can spin up VPS instances in Western Europe, the US East Coast, and major Asian hubs within minutes. Providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode make this trivial. A few clicks, a credit card, and you have servers in Frankfurt, New York, and Singapore.
If that’s all active measurement required, everyone would do it.
The hard part
Our goal isn’t server count. It’s network diversity. We currently operate 1,300+ servers across 550+ cities in 152 countries, with presence in 520+ distinct ASNs. That last number is the one that matters most.
Getting a server in London is easy. Getting a server in Monrovia, Suva, Papeete, or Windhoek is a different exercise entirely.
Here’s what that actually looks like:
Procurement complexity. Many regional providers don’t have self-service signups. You email a sales contact—if you can find one. You wait days or weeks for a response. The website is in French, Finnish, or Portuguese. Payment options are limited: no credit card, only bank transfer, sometimes only local payment methods. We’ve dealt with providers who require notarized documents, company registration proofs, or in-country representatives.
Contract negotiations. Our corporate procurement policy requires monthly contracts for new vendors until we establish trust. Many providers only offer annual terms. Some have penalty clauses for early termination, auto-renewal provisions that lock you in, or pricing structures that don’t make sense for a single small VPS. Every contract needs review. Every negotiation takes time.
Payment processing. Try paying an invoice in Central African francs or Fijian dollars. Banks flag unusual international transfers. Currency conversion fees stack up. Some providers have been burned by international customers and demand payment upfront for six or twelve months. Others simply don’t have the infrastructure to process payments from a US company.
Language barriers. I’ve negotiated hosting contracts in French, Finnish, Spanish, and Portuguese—often with the help of translation tools and a lot of patience. Technical requirements like “2 CPU cores, 4GB RAM, 40GB storage, 200GB+ bandwidth” are universal, but contract terms and support interactions are not.
Operational maintenance. Servers go down. Providers go out of business. Network conditions change. A server that worked fine for two years suddenly has routing issues. Multiply this by 1,300+ servers across providers with varying levels of support responsiveness, and you have a full-time operational challenge.
Why diversity matters
Here’s the thing: 1,000 servers in the same 50 ASNs would be nearly useless for measurement purposes. RTT-based geolocation depends on having vantage points that are topologically close to the targets you’re measuring. A server in AWS us-east-1 tells you very little about an IP address in a regional ISP in Guatemala.
Network diversity is the entire point. When we have a server hosted directly within an ISP’s network, we can measure their IP ranges with sub-millisecond precision. We can identify which IPs are in which facilities. We can detect when traffic patterns change.
This is why we actively seek hosting partnerships with ISPs and regional providers, even when the procurement process is painful. A single server in an underserved network is worth more to our measurement accuracy than a dozen servers in AWS regions.
The investment
ProbeNet is a dedicated infrastructure requiring continuous expansion, maintenance, and relationship management. We have a goal to reach 200 countries and 2,000 points of presence. Every new country, every new ASN, every new city adds measurement capability that didn’t exist before.
The server cost is the smallest part of the equation. The real investment is in the global procurement, the vendor relationships, the contract negotiations, the payment logistics, the ongoing maintenance, and the strategic decisions about where to expand next. And lots of infrastructure engineering and SRE investment around it!
We’re not aggregating geofeeds and calling it a product. We’re building the infrastructure to actually verify where IP addresses are located—one server, one ASN, one country at a time.
Want guaranteed accuracy for your prefixes? Help us improve IP geolocation accuracy and host a ProbeNet server: Host a IPinfo Probe Server