According to the VeriSign Domain Report for the second quarter of 2008 which has just been published, there were some 168 million domain name registrations across the Top Level Domain Names at the midpoint of the year. That represents a 22 percent increase over the same period last year, and up four percent over the first quarter of 2008. Country code top level domains were also up, 27 percent when viewed as a year on year figure to a total of 65 million domain names.

If you break the domain name industry down into the largest top level domains when ordered according to base size, then the list has remained relatively constant. No surprise that .com sits at the top, although it might come as a bit of a shock to some that the Germans are right there in the number two spot with .de ahead of China, .cn, in third.

Then we have .net in fourth, followed by .uk, .org, .info, .nl (The Netherlands), .eu (European Union), and .biz

When it comes to Domain Name System queries, then VeriSign report that it processed peak loads of more than 48 billion per day in the second quarter 2008. Amazingly, during this time the VeriSign DNS kept a 100 percent uptime record. Perhaps not so amazingly, as it has remained up 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” said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of Naming Services, VeriSign. “VeriSign’s unique capability to operate global networks of this nature at this scale and reliability remains unparalleled.”