Looks like we’re headed for a big milestone on the Internet: 200 million registered domain names. By the end of Q1 this year there were a total of 193 million domain names when counting all top-level domains. That was two months ago.

When we say all top-level domains, we mean both gTLDs and ccTLDs. gTLDs are those generic top-level domains like .com, .net and .org. ccTLDs are country code top-level domains such as .de, .cn and .uk.

We may already have passed 200 million domain names, actually. Two months ago, there were less than 117 million gTLDs. Now there are almost 121 million. That’s an increase of more than 4 million domain names, and that without including the more than 240 ccTLDs that exist out there. So, if you count all top-level domains together, 200 million either is very, very close, or a number we’ve recently passed.

From 100 to 200 million

To put the 200 million number in perspective, it might be worth to point out when we passed 100 million domain names. The Internet did this back in Q2 2006, so it’s not too long ago.

Here is what the domain name growth has looked like since then:

Above: The weak increase in Q1 2010 is mainly because China changed the rules for .cn registrations, which made millions of .cn domain names drop off.

And for those of you who wonder how many of today’s domain names are .coms: There are almost 88 million .com domain names. That’s more than six times as many domain names as the second-largest, .de (Germany’s ccTLD), which has 13.7 million domain names. Com is still the undisputed king.

Data sources: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, RegistrarStats, DENIC.

Further reading: Interested in domain names? Check out the domain name infographic we recently put together.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

Read more

Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

Read more

The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

Read more

Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

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, security, and other geeky topics.

Read more

“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Read more