Domain Registration Increased 32 Percent in One Year

Registered domain names have grown to a base of 120 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLD) (define) according to “The Domain Name Industry Brief, March 2007” published by VeriSign. The total number of domains comprises a 32 percent increase between 2005 and 2006. A total 11.6 million new domain names were registered in Q4 of last year. After .com registrations, the most new domains were under .de (Germany); .net, .uk (United Kingdom); and .org.

Registrations under the country code TLD (ccTLD) .cn in China exceeded 500,000 names during the last three months of 2007. That’s a 43 percent quarter-over-quarter increase.

“A lot of countries…where there were restrictions on the Internet, as they become relaxed there will be a lot of growth,” said Ken Silva, chief security officer at VeriSign.

The increase in registrations, 32 percent year-over-year between 2005 and 2006, and 8 percent from Q3 to Q4 of 2006, reflects an increase in the way people access and use the Internet.

“The registrations themselves present one challenge,” said Silva. “People do more online now, it’s the vast numbers of things moving onto the ‘Net, and the number of things people are doing once on the ‘Net.”

Growth was driven by broadband penetration, new business applications, and e-commerce. Access methods such as VoIP, Web-enabled cell phones, and IPTV create additional means of accessing the Internet, and increase the need for better ways to handle queries. New access methods, and expanded use of the Web has increased DNS query rates. A query is an attempt to access a site, where the domain name must be matched with the corresponding DNS number. In 2000, an Internet user averaged 4 DNS queries. With 250 million Internet users, about one billion DNS queries were served per day. The rate in 2007 averages 25 DNS queries per Internet user. For every one billion Internet users, 25 billion DNS queries are served each day.