(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IT infrastructure service provider VeriSign (www.verisign.com) announced on Thursday that there are now more than 180 million registered domain names on the Internet, according to its first quarter 2009 Domain Name Industry Brief (www.verisign.com/domainbrief).
The first quarter of 2009 showed nearly 183 million registered domain names across all of the top lovel domain names, which shows a three percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase over the same quarter from last year.
Meanwhile, country code TLDs increased to 74.1 million domain names during the first quarter, representing a four percent jump from the previous quarter and an 18 percent increase year over year.
When compared to the total number of registrations, .com continues to lead the TLD category, followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net. This composition remains unchanged from Q4 2008.
The first quarter of 2009, which is traditionally a strong period for domain name registrations, saw an average of 2.4 million new .com and .net registrations added each month.
The same quarter showed the overall base of .com and .net domain names increase to 92.4 million domain names.
These numbers show a two percent increase from Q4 2008, a nine percent increase over the same quarter of the previous year, and a 34 percent increase over the first quarter of 2007.
Throughout the quarter, VeriSign provided 100 percent uptime for DNS queries – a track record it has maintained for 11 years.
VeriSign’s daily DNS query load averaged 38 billion during the first quarter, representing an increase from the 35 billion queries in fourth quarter 2008.
The latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief also highlights the company’s analysis of DNS queries and DNS resolution.
The analysis shows how the most queried .com domain names, such as Google.com and Yahoo.com are not necessarily the only domain names Internet users rely upon.
They also rely heavily on infrastructure oriented domain names that support DNS servers, hosting farms or even advertising platforms.
“As the authoritative registry for .com and .net domain names, VeriSign has a unique view into the pulse of the Internet,” says Jill Corso McNabb, vice president of naming services at VeriSign. “DNS resolution truly comprises the backbone of what makes the Internet operate across the globe. DNS becomes even more critical to the overall infrastructure of the Internet not only as Internet usage grows but also as innovative products and services related to the DNS proliferate.”
Each year, the company publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet.
Earlier this week, VeriSign announced it extended its partnership with small and medium-sized businesses online web design, hosting and marketing firm Web.com.
