Getting country based on IP
The slowest part will be the request to the remote server. There is not much you can do to make this faster. You may want to cache the results you get back from hostip, or you may want to have a local database.

Furthermore, the API seems to return XX if it does not know the country, you may want to check for that.

Also, you do not close the InputStream or the InputStreamReader, and it is possible that you do not close the BufferedReader when an exception occurs. I don't know exactly whether this will cause any problems.