Daily Domainer

VeriSign released the latest issue (PDF file) of its Domain Industry Brief. By the end of 2006, there were more than 120 million registered domains, which represents a growth of 32% over the previous year. In terms of registrations, .com remains the largest top level domain, followed by .de, .net, .uk and .org:

Other interesting facts:

• In 2006, 76% of expiring domains were renewed by their owners.
• 63% of all .com and .net domains resolve to live websites, 23% are parked (this includes PPC domains and websites under construction) and the remaining 14% do not have a website of any kind.
• VeriSign's statistics does not include any information about domains that were deleted during the grace period (a phenomenon known as domain tasting). This would be important and necessary because the inclusion in these statistics of domains that were still in the five day grace period would make it impossible to tell how much of the growth in .com and .net domains is artificial and temporary.
• VeriSign processed an average of 24 to 25 billion .com and .net queries per day in the fourth quarter of 2006, compared to 1 billion queries in 2000.
• In 2006, unknown perpetrators leveraged 32,000 hijacked PCs to launch a DDOS attack on VeriSign's DNS servers that was 70 times larger than any attack seen previously. To counter future attacks VeriSign continues to increase its bandwidth.