how can i know in which state a server is located?

Question

hi,
i working on a project which compare between load time of websites on different server around the world.

in my project i need to buy a spot for a website in several servers but i don't know in which country the server is actually located. i found an add-on in firefox called "flagfox" (i'm not related to the program, to check it visit: http://flagfox.net/) which indicate in which country the site is located.

i want to know:
a) how can "flagfox" know in which country the site is located? (in is not by the extention e.g .com .uk)
b) how can i know where in the country itself the site is located, i.e in the u.s.a is not very helpful because the server can be in new-york or in los angeles which are several time zones apart.
c) if i don't know the answer to a, how can i verify that the data from "flagfox" or other software for that matter, is reliable?

thanks

Answer 1

From the Flagfox site:

It works by accessing an internal IP address location database, basically a rough map of the physical layout of the Internet, based on data provided by Maxmind.

You can get access to the maxmind dataset at http://www.maxmind.com/app/ip-location.

Brady

Answer 2

There's a good article about this here, complete with sample code. It references a database that is available here.

The database can also be obtained here.