Domains Grow as DNS Query Volume Spikes

VeriSign’s fourth quarter 2011 Domain Name Information Brief (DNIB) report counts the total number of registered domain names at 225 million. At the end of the third quarter of 2011, VeriSign reported that there were 220 million registered domain names.

Year-over-year, domain registrations grew by 20.4 million from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the fourth quarter of 2011. Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) grew by 13.2 percent. According to VeriSign, there are now 90.6 million ccTLDs registered worldwide. Those 90.6 million domains are spread across 290 ccTLD extensions, though 60 percent of them can be found in the top 10 ccTLDs.

Though ccTLDs are growing fast, .com and .net are still growing fast too.

“.com/.net reached a combined total of 113.8 million domain names in the fourth quarter of 2011, which represents approximately a 2 percent increase in the base over the third quarter of 2011, and an 8 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010,” Patrick Kane, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Naming Services at Verisign told <em>InternetNews.com</em>. “Registrants continue to find value in their .com and .net domain names.”

In addition to managing .com, VeriSign also manages the root DNS servers for the Internet, which came under heavy load during the fourth quarter. Peak DNS query volume grew by 51 percent to 117 billion queries. The average DNS query load grew by eight percent to 64 billion queries.

“From time to time we see spikes in the peak DNS query load that are driven by increased DNS-based attack traffic,” Kane said.

 

 

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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