September 4, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign (verisign.com) has released its Domain Report for the second quarter of 2008, reporting a continued global internet growth of four percent over the previous quarter and 22 percent growth over Q2 last year.
According to VeriSign's report released Thursday, there were a total of 168 million domain name registrations at the midpoint of 2008. VeriSign, itself is also a global registry operator for .com and .net.
However, country-specific Top Level Domain names showed a marked increase, totaling 65 million, a 27 percent increase year over year.
The rank of TLDs according to size was as follows: .com, .de, .cn, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu and .biz.
The relative size of China's .cn domain was the topic of much online discussion on Domain Name Forum (dnforum.com) where other explanations were given other than the relative size of the Chinese population and business growth.
One user suggested that .cn is the most widely-used extension for spam, making it understandably popular, while others suggested that the low price of domains was a large factor. A senior commentator stated that .cn domains were once free and are now priced at 13 cents per year for residents, compared to $19.99 that discount registrar GoDaddy (godaddy.com) charges for a .us domain. There is also discussion about the Chinese government's promotion of the .cn TLD for business instead of the secondary .com. Also, because Google and YouTube are not as widely used in china, .cn may be a better choice for search engine optimization for the country's own services.
In preparing the report, VeriSign reports processing peak loads of more than 48 billion Domain Name System queries daily, resulting from millions of internet users accessing web sites or sending email. The VeriSign DNS continued its 100 percent uptime throughout the second quarter of 2008, as it has for the past decade.
"Securing and protecting the integrity of DNS is critical to the stability of the global Internet, and VeriSign is continuing to make investments that improve the scalability and fortification of this critical infrastructure," VeriSign naming services senior vice president Raynor Dahlquist in a statement. "VeriSign's unique capability to operate global networks of this nature at this scale and reliability remains unparalleled."
VeriSign also made special note of Latin American, where the growth in .com and .net for the quarter was 31 percent, outpacing worldwide growth by 11 percentage points as the continent's access, connectivity and usage grows.
