Domain Names Exceed 183 million

Today, the Internet now has total base of nearly 183 million domain names says Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign Inc. The number represents a three percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase over the same quarter last year. In India, the total number of domain names was 1.4 million as on March 31, 2009, with approximately 800,000 .com and .net domain names. However, .com remains the most popular Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) category, followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net. The composition in fact remains same as in fourth quarter of 2008. During the quarter, the overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 92.4 million domain names. This represents a two percent increase from Q4 2008, a jump of nine percent over the same quarter of the previous year, and an increase of 34 percent over the first quarter of 2007. The analysis shows that the most queried .com domain names sites like Google.com and Yahoo.com are not necessarily the only domain names Internet users rely upon. Rather, there are infrastructure-oriented domain names that support DNS servers, hosting farms or even advertising platforms and the number of DNS queries the infrastructure domain names receive can be in the same range as the many popular end user-oriented domain names with more familiar and recognized domain names. VeriSign industry brief shows that in addition to provisioning domain names, a domain name registry operator enables users to actually reach those domain names by resolving the domain names to an Internet address that serves the content users seek. Naming Services at VeriSign. DNS resolution truly comprises the backbone of what makes the Internet operate across the globe. DNS becomes even more critical to the overall infrastructure of the Internet not only as Internet usage grows but also as innovative products and services related to the DNS proliferate.