Verisign, the registry that handles the .com and .net top-level domains (TLDs), has released a new edition of its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, a report covering trends within the domain name industry.

As usual the report is crammed full of data about domain name registration trends and which TLDs are the most popular. We’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting data points for your reading pleasure.

Registrations across all TLDs

Counting all TLDs there are now 184 million registered domain names (to be precise, this was the number at the midpoint of 2009). About nine million new domain names were registered during the second quarter of 2009, but the total number of domain names only went up with about one million (because of dropped domain names, i.e. existing domain names that weren’t renewed).

Country code TLDs

There are now 74.4 million country code TLDs (ccTLDs), which means that 40% of all registered domain names are ccTLDs.

Out of the more than 240 ccTLDs in the world, the top 10 make up a full 66% of all domain registrations. It’s interesting to note that .us only comes in at number 10, probably due to the pervasive use of .com in the US.

Renewals are going down

An interesting trend revealed by the Verisign report is that the renewal rate for domain names has been decreasing for some time now, at least for .com and .net domain names. The trend is clearly visible:

If you compare Q2 2009 with Q2 2007, renewal rate for .com/.net has gone down from 76% to 70%. Looks like it’s been dropping with about three percent units per year, so it will be interesting to see if this will continue into 2010.

Exactly what this trend depends on isn’t discussed in the report, but one might speculate that due to the larger number of domain names in general there are fewer “good” ones that people want to keep just on speculation in the long run. That’s probably just part of the truth, though. (If you have other theories, please share them with us in the comments.)

In conclusion

A year ago, the number of domain names across all TLDs was 168 million, so with today’s 184 million that means the number has grown with more than 9%.

Then there’s the mystery of the slowing rate of domain name renewals. Again, if anyone has any theories, please feel free to chime in!

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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