The last time we asked that question here at DaniWeb was back in June 2009 when the Internet was, apparently, 183 million big. Of course, it is bigger now, but not actually by that much if the new figures from Internet infrastructure services provider VeriSign are anything to go by. With the 25th birthday of the .com Top Level Domain fast approaching, it would appear that the Internet is now 192 million big.
In the newly published Domain Name Industry Brief, VeriSign reveals that 2009 came to a close with a base of more than 192 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domains. That's up by 15 million since close of play in 2008, just for the record. As far as the fourth quarter of 2009 was concerned, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008 while new registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009 came in at around 3.7 million domain name registrations per month.
VeriSign reckons that the overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 96.7 million domain names at the end of 2009, representing a two percent increase over the third quarter and a seven percent increase over the same quarter in 2008.
New .com and .net registrations added at an average of around 2.4 million per month in the last quarter of 2009 making a total of 7.3 million new registrations in that quarter with a renewal rate for the fourth quarter 2009 of 71 percent compared to the third quarter of 2009 which was approximately 70.5 percent.
Finally, VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during that fourth quarter was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, about the same as the average and peak queries per day in the third quarter. However, the DNS query load rose by 48 percent as a daily average and 31 percent increase for peak queries compared to the fourth quarter of 2008.