How many Internet domain names are there?

happygeek 3 Tallied Votes 1K Views Share

Ever wondered just how many domain names there are on the Internet? DaniWeb has, and can reveal the answer as being an almost astonishing 215 million worldwide.

According to global Internet infrastructure provider and domain registrar Verisign, more than five million domain names were added to the total during the second quarter of this year alone, which represents a growth rate of 2.5 percent above the previous three months. To put that into some perspective, that's a year on year growth in the number of Internet domains of 8.6 percent or some 16.9 million domains.

If you were to look at just the number of .com and .net domains registered, then you are talking about a running total of more than 110 million by the end of that second quarter 2011 cut off point. New registrations within the two domain high flyers accounted for 8.1 million in the quarter. However, according to the DomainTools statistics site the Internet could have been be so much bigger if domains had not expired and been deleted over the years - or could it? The current numbers suggest that a staggering 328,456,608 .com domains have been deleted since the Top Level Domain was first created, and 36,196,098 .net domains for good measure. Actually, domains which expire are added to the deleted column and remove3d from the active, but are available for re-registration immediately. So the deleted column is a cumulative total over the decades.

Interestingly, China moved ahead of the European Union after the .cn domain became the eighth largest in the world and .eu dropped down a place to ninth. And if there are any DNS server admin nerds out there who are interested in such things, take comfort in knowing that the average daily DNS query load on the Verisign servers during that second quarter of the year alone was 56 billion, peaking at 68 billion!

decade commented: Thanks +4
CrAshRus 0 Newbie Poster

That may be true for the number of registered domains but the even bigger question is how many domains are possible. Technically, a domain name can have all the letters, all the number and a dash. But, the domain name cannot start or end with the dash. The total characters allowed is 63 and must contain at least 2 characters. It's a big big number so it means there are plenty of opportunities for domainers.

Dumars 0 Newbie Poster

Thanks for the nice info.

ayubcbe 0 Newbie Poster

Thanks for the good arcticle

jfejsa 0 Newbie Poster

Are we ever going to reach a saturation point when everything just stops?

decade 2 Junior Poster in Training

This is good. thanks.

B0716L 0 Light Poster

This is really cool =)

silverice282 0 Newbie Poster

the .cn domain became the eighth largest in the world

Indeed, China has come out many websites in recent years. Because of its large population, many website has high ranking...

ShieldsCW 0 Newbie Poster

Which mean ICANN is making over 50 million dollars every year on registration fees. I wonder if that's enough to cover their costs :/

chanchan29 0 Newbie Poster

How many domains are currently established within the internet?

chanchan29 0 Newbie Poster

If the "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) were to open up the approval for more domain names, what would be the advantages or disadvantages?

chanchan29 0 Newbie Poster

Who would benefit and who would be hurt by these actions?

markjanyson 0 Newbie Poster

Your threat is really valuable. Thanks for this great info.

David_49 0 Newbie Poster

Have you seen the data from NetCraft? Specifcally the Web Server Survey?

If you had to take note of that data, you'll see that the number of active sites has gone up significantly and now is close to 1.028 billion sites!

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/

safeer008 -3 Newbie Poster

Very Nice I really got some very interusting information. Thanks

Member Avatar for Del4eff
Del4eff

Interesting statistics
Thanks

iJimJones 15 Newbie Poster

David_49, are the 1 billion web sites counted by NetCraft equivalent to the count of Internet Domain Names noted in this article? For instance, if www.hostname.edu/~jdoe and www.hostname.edu/~jsmith are different personal websites, I assume they would only be counted once for domain www.hostname.edu but perhaps twice as different web site. I couldn't find a description of how NetCraft counted "websites".

Pk domain 0 Newbie Poster

Wow, it's a huge amount of domain name that have their identity over internet, I really wondered to know the estimated amount that you have published here. its really informative article.

RyderSkerst1 0 Newbie Poster

Thank you so much for your information

bijutoha 42 Junior Poster

Very expensive collection. Look I'm going to count today then how will the calculation!!!

happygeek 2,411 Most Valuable Poster Team Colleague Featured Poster

Pardon?

Portia_1 0 Newbie Poster

i wonder how many domains are there now especially ith the new tld's that where added

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