Those Expanding Internet Domain Names

Think all the good domain names are taken? Think again.

If the latest set of statistics from VeriSign is any indication, there are still a lot of domain names to go around. VeriSign reported that in 2007 there were 33 million new domain registrations, bringing the total number of domains registered to
153 million.

The .com and .net registries still command the lion’s share of the total number of domains registered with 80.4 million registrants. VeriSign claims that the 2007 .com and .net new domain registration tally was a 24 percent year over year increase from 2006 when there were 65 million registrations.

Not far behind are Country Code Top Level Domain Name registrations (ccTLDs), which had a 33 percent increase over 2006, bringing the total in 2007 to 58 million domain name registrations.

Digging deeper in the ccTLD numbers reveals that .de (Germany) is the largest ccTLD in terms of total domain registrations. China’s .cn came in second growing in 2007 by a staggering 399 percent, according to VeriSign.
The .uk (Britain) ccTLD holds down the number three spot and grew at 17 percent in 2007.

So what are people doing with all those domains? It depends which one you’re asking about.

When it comes to .com and .net, VeriSign estimates that 89 percent actually resolve to a Web site (as opposed to just being a registration that doesn’t point to a site).

Looking at the 80 million .com and .net registrations that it manages, VeriSign further reported that 65 percent of domains resolve to a Web site that are actually multipage Websites. Only 23 percent resolve to single page Web sites, which typically include parked domains as well as under construction websites.

Traffic to all those .com and .net domains is directed via DNS , which is managed by VeriSign on a contract with ICANN. VeriSign claims that it processed a peak load of 33 billion DNS queries per day in the fourth quarter of 2007.

VeriSign won the renewed ICANN contract for DNS management in 2006. The deal extends VeriSign’s mastery of .com and .net until at least 2012 when the deal is next up for renewal.

As part of its Domain Name Industry Brief, VeriSign also emphasized the importance of its efforts to expand DNS for the IPv6. The efforts include $100 million of upgrades to improve the scalability
of VeriSign’s DNS infrastructure for the challenges of continued domain and IP address expansion.