With 271 mn domain names, Internet continues to grow

There are 271 million registered domain names worldwide across all the top-level domains (TLDs) as of December 31, 2013 an increase of 5 million domain names, or 1.9% over the third quarter of 2013.

As more and more people get on the web, registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3%, year over year, said the study by VeriSign's quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief.

According to the report, the .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2013, reaching a combined total of approximately 127.2 million domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. This represents a 5% increase year over year.

The .Com TLD continued to be the most popular with 112 million names registered as of December 31, 2013, while .net equaled 15.2 million names.

New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.2 million during the fourth quarter of 2013. In the fourth quarter of 2012, new .com and .net registrations totaled 8.0 million, said Verisign, the operator of .Com and .net registeries.

During the fourth quarter of 2013, Verisign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 82 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 100 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 0.9% and the peak decreased 5.5%. Year over year, the daily average increased 6.4% and the peak decreased 19.2%.

The largest TLDs in order by zone size were .com, .tk (Tokelau), .de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom), .org, .cn (China), .info, .ru (Russian Federation) and .nl (Netherlands).

The report further said that the growth in TLD registration is still very small compared to what the Internet can consume. To help put the total TLD availability into perspective, today there are 2.5 billion Internet users around the globe.

If every one of those users registered a domain name every single second for 30 million years, they would register a total of about 2.4 septillion domain names (that's 2.4 followed by 24 zeros). And that is less than one billionth of a billionth of one%! Therefore, it is extremely remote we will ever run out of domain names, said the report.