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Domain names, without them the web would just be a bunch of hard-to-remember IP addresses. Imagine telling your buddies, “Oh, I found this awesome site at 72.14.204.104 last night.”
And yet, many of us don’t know all that much about them. Prepare to be cured of that, because here is…
We stumbled upon an interesting statistic the other day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD domain names, i.e. domain names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com domain names.
This number needs to be put into perspective to understand how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is about 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate domain names.
So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: domain tasting.
Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.
Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.
Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.
This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.
The best domain names have vanished into the interweb’s vortex. People need to be creative. Using country code top-level domains (ccTLD) to create a unique domain is a great way to play on the domain extension and the name itself, also known as a domain hack. Some ccTLDs have lost its original meaning/purpose as they are now frequently used by international companies rather than by the country’s natives. We found ten sites that have been successful in combining their name with a ccTLD.
