Recently in Statistics Category

2010 is the year that .com celebrates 25 years, but it's also the year the .uk marks a quarter of a century.

Over 25 years the .uk namespace has grown and grown to become one of the most widely used addresses on the internet outside of .com

The growth pattern is quite interesting.

During the first 11 years only 26 thousand domains were registered. One million names were in the zone by February 2000, which then grew to 5 million by 2006.

There are currently over 8.5 million .uk domains!

If you're a fan of statistics you can see the latest numbers from the registry here

DNS.be, the registry operator for the .be namespace, has released figures on .be usage.
According to the report, which was released earlier today, there are over 600 thousand websites using .be. In real terms this means that roughly 7 out of 10 .be domains is actively being used for websites. Of course, as the report points out, just because a .be doesn't direct to a website does not mean that is not being used for email or other services.

Some more figures:
"43% of all websites consists of just one page, while 27% have more than one page.
 - 14% of domain names direct visitors to another domain name.
 - Only 16% of domain names have no website. Which does not mean they are not being used, because you can also create your own e-mail addresses when you have a domain name.
 - On average, each homepage at a Belgian website features 13 links.
- 57% feature JavaScript, used mainly for interactive applications in a website
 - 56% have CSS, which streamlines the layout of all the pages of a website
 - 11% use Flash to display animations and web-videos
 - 27% feature keywords that indicate search engines what the website is about
"

It would be interesting to see if the single page sites were merely placeholders or parked, but the press release does not go into that much detail.

In any case, it's always interesting to see what people are actually doing with domains.
More information is available on the registry's site.

The IEDR, which is the current registry operator for dotIE (.ie), announced today that its quarter 1 registration figures were the highest to date.

Close to 10 thousand IE domains were registered in the period up to the end of March 2009, which is a 28% increase over Q4 2008. Though the press release doesn't mention that Q4 is shorter due to the Christmas break, which leads to registrations not being completed in one calendar year, but being carried across to the next one.

According to the release over 80% of the domains were registered to either sole traders or companies.

Trawling through domain dispute data can be vaguely amusing, if you're a bit bored on a Saturday...

By TLD in no particular order:

• .ie - total of 25 cases, 4 so far this year of which 3 are ongoing (greenoffice.ie, todayfm.ie, monsterfinance.ie)
• .es - 145
• .fr 180
• 
  
• .tel - none to date

• .mobi - 189 to date

• .asia - 8 to date
• .pro - 8 to date
• .name - 38 so far
• .museum - none, but that's hardly surprising
• .cat - 4
• .info 825 so far
• .biz 725
• .net 2844
• .com 21552 cases (not surprising that it's so much higher, but the actual figure is higher than I was expecting
• .aero - only one case, which was denied (D2004-0669)
• .jobs - none
• .travel 12
• .coop - none

All the information is pulled from public sources...

DNS.be has announced that the 900th thousandth .be domain has gone live. So how long before they break the magic million?

Full release below:

900,000th .be domain name activated

Today 16 April 2009, saw the 900,000th .be domain name registered with DNS BE.

The 900,000th domain name is artchaud.be, owned by a Flemish artist creating lithographs and silk-screen prints for expositions. He is the lucky winner of 10 XL promotion stickers, which he can use to promote his website.

At the turn of the year, there were 860,000 domain names registered, a net growth of more than 16,7%. The 900,000th domain name being clocked already today clearly shows that the financial and economic crisis does not withhold the Belgians from registering their domain names. From all the holders of a .be website 70% is effectively situated in Belgium. Meaning that hundreds of thousands of Belgians are clearly familiar with .be domain names.

This year is the tenth anniversary of DNS BE. Its task is to manage and register all .be domain names: register who registered which domain name, control transfers, but mainly to ensure that all domain names are accessible. To put it in an easy way: it is the 'telephone exchange' of Belgium's Internet services.

A short history: Professor Pierre Verbaeten of the Computer Science department of the Catholic University of Leuven started registering .be domain names in Belgium in 1989. Up to 1994, 129 names were registered. Since then, the number has risen sharply. At the request of Pierre Verbaeten, the responsibility for the registration of the domain names for .be was transferred to DNS Belgium, a non-profit association, which was established for this purpose on 2 February 1999 by ISPA, Agoria and Beltug.

DNS.be, who run the Belgian (.be) registry have announced their figures and report for 2008.

Unlike some registries that focus purely on number, the Belgian registry has done some analysis on the type of registrant.

Some of the results are not surprising.

Most .be domains are registered to Belgians (over 70%).

69% are registered by Flemings, so does that mean that the Walloons are registering .com or .fr instead?

The number of .be domains registered by private individuals continues to grow, with them now accounting for 28% of the total

16 registrars are responsible for more than 50% of registrations (this would appear to be a common trend in ccTLDs)

The registry also reported that there was a growth of 16.7% in the namespace overall.

You can read the full release on their site

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The IEDR has obviously released some form of press release in the last few days to put a spin on its latest figures. Of course the press release isn't on the registry's website nor has it been sent to stakeholders yet again, though I was able to get my hands on a copy of it via a 3rd party.

So what are they trying to sell us today?

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) today reported a 23% jump in the net number of .ie websites registered in Ireland in Q3 compared to the same period last year.
 
The growing number of companies and sole traders moving their business operations online and choosing to do so with a .ie website is one of the main reasons for the rise, in addition to five consecutive years of price reductions by the IEDR, which has made it more affordable for businesses to do so. The cost of registering a .ie domain has fallen by over 60% since 2003.

There are two serious issues with that section of their statement.
The price that the IEDR is referring to is the wholesale price NOT the retail price. The retail price is set by the registrars not the registry and for the registry to make these kind of comments about pricing is inappropriate. Other registry operators would not make comments about their registrars pricing policies, so why should the IEDR?
To claim that the price has fallen is misleading, as the fall in price / cost will only have affected the registrars not the registrants. For the registry to make allusions to pricing in this manner suggests that they are in some way influencing the retail pricing

 
The latest figures from the IEDR, the managed registry for Ireland's official internet address .ie, show that new registrations were up by almost a fifth with 8,197 .ie websites registered in the period July to September 2008.

If the figures are official why aren't they published openly on the IEDR's site?

Why must they insist on referring to themselves as "the managed registry" without ever explaining what they are managing?

Registrations rose by 20.3% representing a substantial increase on figures from the same period last year, when 6,813 .ie website registrations were recorded. The increase also means the total number of .ie websites registered in Ireland now exceeds 110,000, just four months after the 100,000th barrier was broken earlier in May this year.
 
Of the .ie websites registered in Q3 83.3% of those were registered by corporate bodies and sole traders while personal domains blogs and other non-commercial websites, accounted for 2.5% of the registrations, placing Ireland on a par with the level of uptake recorded for other country code top level domains.  

Based on what criteria exactly? Claiming that Ireland is "on a par" with other countries is fine, but can they actually cite any real figures to support that claim?

Only 2.5% of IE domains are used by non-business users according to their statistics, but there is no explanation of why this is the case. There's no comparison between Ireland and other countries in this regard either.

If you were to compare IE registrations with FR registrations, for example, I somehow doubt that IE would come out looking so well. Unlike Ireland the French registry doesn't put silly barriers in the way of legitimate registrations.

For the first time this quarter the IEDR has also made multiyear registrations available to resellers for a period of 2 - 10 years, thus enabling .ie resellers to register and secure a .ie domain for several years at a time. The IEDR plans to extend this service by Q1 by offering resellers the option of multiyear renewals.

Wouldn't publishing data related to this change have been a bit more newsworthy?
The public won't understand or care what a "reseller" is in this context.
The introduction of multi-year registrations is a positive move, but the lack of multiyear renewals seriously hampers its effectiveness and causes headaches.

Commenting on the 20% rise in .ie registrations, Mr. David Curtin, Chief Executive of IE Domain Registry, said; "This has been another very strong quarter for the IEDR and one we expect to see continue into Q4, when it is predicted that the number of .ie domains registered will exceed the 115,000 mark by year end. Our reseller community, in particular, has been instrumental in driving registrations again this year and as broadband rollout and download speeds continue to improve, we expect to see more companies and SMEs, in particular, availing of .ie as a secure local online environment in which to do business".

Curtin should get an award of some kind for fluffy meaningless statements.

If the IEDR actually cared about their resellers they would actually communicate with them, but they obviously don't.

The reseller community drives registrations and basically keeps the IEDR and its staff in jobs, yet the IEDR do not care enough about the registrars / resellers to even bother sharing press releases with them - we have to find out from a 3rd party.

And of course nowhere in the press release is there any mention of Comreg, the extended registry downtime over the past few weeks or any of their inane proposals, such as the policy board that would not have any registrar representation.

John McCormac has been collecting and processing statistics on domain registrations and hosting for as long as I can remember. He is probably best known for Hackwatch and WhoisIreland, which produces monthly reports for the Irish hosting and domain industry.

John's latest project has been in development for several months and offers an alternative to some of the existing domain statistics sites already on the market.

What makes it different is that HosterStats cares about ccTLD data.

Sites like WebHosting.info and DomainTools all but ignore ccTLD data and give a rather skewed perspective of non-US based providers.

With Hosterstats you can easily check the DNS history on any .com/.net/org/info/mobi/eu/asia/co.uk or .ie domain name.

While the site isn't the prettiest at present it is incredibly functional and nice and fast to load, so you get the information that you want quickly and easily.

It will be interesting to see what John plans on adding in terms of features in the coming weeks and months.