The number of worldwide domain name registrations continues its climb on the basis of a strong global economy and an increase in Internet users.
According to VeriSign’s May 2005 report, called Domain Name Industry Brief, released this week, worldwide domain registrations during the first quarter of 2005 hit a record high of 76.9 million, a 22 percent year-over-year increase and 8 percent growth over the fourth quarter of 2004.
Top Level Domains (TLDs)
the first quarter of this year, which is the highest increase yet recorded by VeriSign. An average of
1.6 million new .com and .net registrations were added per month.
According to VeriSign’s data, 75 percent of .com and .net
domain registrants are choosing to renew their domains, which is the
continuation of trend that began in 2003.
“Historically, an indicator of the health and growth of the Internet has
been the number of domain names registered and renewed,” said Raynor Dahlquist, vice president of VeriSign’s Naming Services, in a statement.
The dominant domain remains .com. In the first quarter of this year, .com represented 47 percent of all domain registrations.
Country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), such as .jp for Japan or .ca for
Canada, accounted for 35 percent of registrations. And generic TLDs, such as .org, .biz and .info collectively represent only 11 percent and .net (once hailed as the successor to .com) a paltry 7 percent.
Other stats, from the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) and Netcraft shed some light on the size of active domains (in terms of domains
that are served), as well as the size of the Internet.
As of January, the ISC reported that there were 317.6 million
Internet hosts with an assigned name, a yearly increase of 36.3 percent.
The June Netcraft Webserver survey
(http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/06/01/june_2005_web_server_survey.ht
ml) reports found that there are just under 65 million active Web servers.