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66.3 Million Domain Names Registered

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Dec 03, 2004 08:03 AM
from the more-and-more dept.
The Internet Announcements
IO ERROR writes "VeriSign announced that 5.1 million new domains were registered in the third quarter of 2004, and that there are now 66.3 million active domain names, both the highest numbers ever. It also said that the percentage of domains registered to live Web sites has increased and country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted."
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  • Content? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ViolentGreen (704134) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:05AM (#10984981)
    I wonder how many have actual content or don't redirect to another site. There are so many names out that that are bought up by corporations that all point to the same ste and so many others that try to capitalize on user stupidity and are just mispellings of popular cites.

  • Squatting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nurgled (63197) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:06AM (#10984983)

    I bet most of this year's domains have been registered by the automated scripts which watch for domain expiry and jump in and register the domain from underneath the owner.

    I've seen this happen in no more than a day. It's very annoying, and means people have to move their sites elsewhere and deal with the old site now being at best a page full of adverts and at worst a redirect to some weird porn.

    • My bet is pr0n sites. They seem to hog every goddamn combination of obscene words.
    • Ahh, but you see, that's the beauty of it; these cocksuckers probably don't watch their own websites. Have a world of wierd porn linking to a website that says "sorry, this scamming bastard has been shut down".

    • Re:Squatting (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You know... Every registar I've had let me renew my addresses way before they'd expire and even have a "saftey period" right after they expire before anyone can re-register it. Of course maybe I've just got good registars, but seriously if you aren't really watching your domains and renewing them then perhaps you don't really want to keep them.

      I've got a hunch more than a few of those domains just happened to be "sold" to those scripts. It's more logical.

      • Re:Squatting (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ad0gg (594412)
        No all registars do that, you have a safety period of about a month. There's still a big rush to grab the domain after this period. Especially since search engines are now giving higher weight to websites that have been around for a while. I guarantee if you have PR 6 or higher and you let your domain expire, there will be every damn search engine spammer and their mom trying to get your domain.
    • Well, this could cause some problems for those evil scripts...

      What is the Domain Redemption Period?

      The redemption period is a Domain Registry period of up to 30 days that occurs when a domain name is deleted after having expired unrenewed. Instead of just getting deleted and returning to the pool of domain names available for registration, the existing registry keeps a hold on the domain name in a what is technically called as REDEMPTION PERIOD.

      *IMPORTANT PART*
      During this 30-day redemption period,
    • I mean, in this day and age you have to be a complete baffoon to let your domain expire. My registrart ( GoDaddy.com ) sends me notices about it needing renewal 1 month, 1 week,3 days, and 1 day before expiry. I imagine other registrars are simmilar - after all, they want you to renew with them.

      How can you not notice all these??? If you let the date slip by after all these, then you don't care baout the domain very much, or are a moron. Or both.

      • How can you not notice all these??? If you let the date slip by after all these, then you don't care baout the domain very much, or are a moron. Or both.

        Or you changed email addresses, or you registered with fake data (in spite of the requirement that you don't), or you created a temporary mail account on something like hotmail to register the domain on, or your spam filter deletes it, or the person getting the email has been fired from the company, or ....

      • While that's true (for the gtld registries) I still don't like the idea that thousands of otherwise-available domains are pointing at random advertising sites that nobody cares about.

        Regardless of whether or not this "should" be done, the fact is that these scripts can register domains much more rapidly than any human can directly -- they just go for anything which has just expired. This would at least partially account for a spike in domain registrations, much as scripts for registering common typos do.

        M

  • Don't believe (Score:3, Funny)

    by AlexTheBeast (809587) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:06AM (#10984991)
    I am so jaded.

    The first thing I thought about when I saw this... what is VeriSign trying to pull now.

    /godaddy believer now
    • I don't know why...

      They [slashdot.org] only [slashdot.org] do [slashdot.org] great [slashdot.org] things! [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Don't believe (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ultrasonik (775562) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:40AM (#10985201) Homepage
      One note about Go Daddy. I checked the availability of a domain name on Go Daddy. It was available. Then a couple months later I went to register it and it had been bought by a squatter. This has happened to me not once, but twice. Is Go Daddy selling their whois lookups to squatters?

      • Re:Don't believe (Score:4, Insightful)

        by hendridm (302246) * on Friday December 03 2004, @09:32AM (#10985663) Homepage
        Then a couple months later I went to register it and it had been bought by a squatter.

        Yeah, I went to a used car lot once and the same thing happened. I saw this car that was a sweet ride for a good price. When I came back a couple months later to buy it, it was gone. I think the dealer probably put out extra flyers on it since it was now obvious it was popular, and could thus charge more. Bastard.

  • Add below the most silly domain name you've encountered so far ! this one [all-the-ot...-taken.com] is a nice start

  • New sites (Score:5, Funny)

    by sczimme (603413) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:08AM (#10985004)

    VeriSign announced that 5.1 million new domains were registered in the third quarter of 2004

    The representative then added "Approximately 58% of these are phishing sites."

  • Yoo-hoo!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ceeam (39911) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:10AM (#10985013)
    What a milestone. Or not? Is it any wonder that now there are more registered names than before? Would you expect inverse? Let's post this kind of stuff every month!

    And then - I'm sure they are counting only 2nd level names, right? And country-specific names are not included, are they? informatics.uni.edu and economics.uni.edu are counted as one? the-company.com and thecompany.com are counted as two?

    Finally - what constitutes a "live" web-site? "Under construction" counts? And why a web-site? Is there a rules that every resolved domain name should have a web-server at port 80?
    • Well, yeah. Subdomains beyond the second level aren't usually bought from a registrar, and more importantly, aren't registered. Just add it into your DNS zone, and away you go.

  • My domain (Score:3, Funny)

    by guttergod (94044) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:10AM (#10985014)
    Somebody told you you were one in a million?? I laugh at you lack of uniqueness. I have one domain name... This means I am one in 66.3 million.... Go figure... :)

  • Acceptance of country code TLDs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iwan-nl (832236) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:10AM (#10985015) Homepage
    country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted

    I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in the Netherlands our country-code TLD (.nl) is far more accepted than .com or .net. People have more trust in it because this TLD can only be registered by "legit" companies.

    • It's similar in germany, at least as far as the acceptance of ccTLD (.de) domains are concerned. I'd guess that at least 99.9% of all domain names that you see mentioned in advertising, commercials etc. are under .de, and it's probably even more than that.
    • There is stigma here in Canada against our TLD (.ca) for some reason. Americans hate it ("Pffft. Dot-c-a's suck!"), and Canadians seem to want the usual .com, .net, and .org TLDs.

      That said, country-code TLDs usually cost more for some protectionist reason. You should see the agreement you need to agree to to get a .ca. All sorts of crazy shit which boils down to "Just be glad you don't need a trademark to get a .ca TLD anymore." They removed that insane requirement back when the cira [cira.ca] took over.

    • 4 years ago yes...

      A few years ago, they began allowing the crazy private tld ".123.nl" and such. This wasn't much of a success (hey, the person who owned '123.nl' could even do that), so they decided to allow it alll..

      Right now, it's pretty easy for a company to claim a domain name that is 'truely' theirs over here, which is a big advantage. However, you are able to register it without any proof of being a legit company. Your information is outdated.. :P

  • Country Codes (Score:5, Funny)

    by kjeldor (146944) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:10AM (#10985019)
    "and country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted"

    I'm sure this acceptance has arisen mainly from everyone's favorite Christmas Island website and it's hypnotizing void.
  • IMHO the greatest internet-related quote ever, and one that I will post at any remotely relevant opportunity (forgive my bad memory for inaccuracies)

    Karl: "Hey Homer! You got the #1 non-adult-oriented website!"
    Lenny: "...which makes it 10 trillionth overall!"

  • Is there an alternative to GoDaddy that is just as cheap but doesn't force you to go through all those annoying ads on the way to the checkout counter?



    Eric

  • And in other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alwin Henseler (640539) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:15AM (#10985051) Homepage
    The number of domain names used for hosting adult content, was reported to have hit the 50 million mark.

  • maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JeremyALogan (622913) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:18AM (#10985069) Homepage
    Maybe it's because the old domains never die. These god awful search sites and other squatters just buy them all up. I use to own the domain name jeremylogan.com (my name), since I let it die two different domain squatters have bought it up as soon as it was available. I'm really beginning to think we ought to have to justify our domain names in some fashion.

    If you need a little help being convinced just check out http://manpage.com/ [manpage.com] and tell me THAT URL couldn't be put to some real use.
    • I'm pretty sure that Verisign sells domain searches. I searched for coppit.com there, and a week later a squatter had it. It's not like I was going to pay the extortion, so I had to wait a year before I could get it myself.

  • hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bairy (755347) * on Friday December 03 2004, @08:23AM (#10985101) Homepage
    Lets round the figure down to probably 65million active domains.
    Google - Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages

    8bn/65m is 123 and a bit. So that means that all the websites average out at 123 (cached) pages. When you think the BBC boasts half a million pages, and sites such as zdnet, cnet etc have hundreds of thousands, just think how many sites only have 1 page. What a waste of domain!

    • Re:hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)

      by troon (724114)

      It's worse than that - many single-page sites will have multiple domains pointing to them...

  • CC TLD's (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DarkDust (239124) * <marc@darkdust.net> on Friday December 03 2004, @08:23AM (#10985103) Homepage

    Well, the second biggest TLD in numbers of registered domains is the .de domain for some time now (I don't know for how long... one year, two years ?). And both .uk and .nl aren't small fish either.

    The DENIC [denice.de] (the registry for the german .de TLD) has an interesting graph showing the number of domains in the ten biggest TLDs [denic.de] (in english).

  • Registered... but not in use... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 (721233) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:23AM (#10985106) Homepage
    The dirtiest trick in the book concerning domain names is how some companies use the "Is this domain still available"-forms to register that domainname you asked for, right after you enquired about it.

    I myself have been dumb enough to first enquire about a few (nosoup4u.com/nosoup4u.net) ; only to find out the hard way it had been registered only a couple days later.

    If the site(s) would at least be used, it wouldn't be too disturbing to me... but since it's only registered, to be bought over by the highest bidder...

    I also know it's very hard to regulate this ; and even harder to 'check' if someone is really 'using' a site ; As , after all, someone could be using it (without my knowledge) purely to use it for, eg. FTP transfers, and not a website.

    Still, it gives me a sour taste in my mouth.

  • include pictures of some ladies cat or some family's newborn baby. http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

  • One per company (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName (168064) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:36AM (#10985181) Homepage
    Wasn't it policy back in the dark ages (I seem to remember it from '88-'90 or so) that you could get one (and only one) domain name per company. headache.com and constipation.com wouldn't both go to Johnson & Johnson or some other drug company; you'd have just johnson-and-johnson.com.

    Is this a false memory? I also seem to recall that microsoft.com had just launched its MSN service to go head-to-head with Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. And to get the domain name msn.com, didn't they create a small business just down the street from the main campus, something like Micro Solutions Networking (MSN)? I swear I could remember doing a whois on it in like '92 or so and seeing the highly suspicious street address.

  • .eu (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smacktits (737334) on Friday December 03 2004, @08:43AM (#10985217)

    country code top-level domains are becoming more widely accepted.

    Speaking of country code TLDs, anyone know for sure when .eu will become available? I've been waiting for that for a year now.

      • Re:.eu (Score:2, Insightful)

        by smacktits (737334)
        The EU is a large association of countries and is quite justified in having a TLD. I would have no problems with allotting TLDs to South America, North America, Asia, Australasia or other regions.

        I can't say the same for .info, .biz, .tv and all the other crappy ones out there.

  • Gaining/Losing registrars (Score:5, Informative)

    by Saeger (456549) <farrellj&gmail,com> on Friday December 03 2004, @08:49AM (#10985253) Homepage
    Just thought that it would be interesting to note that NetworkSolutions and Register.com are in the Top10 losing registrars [webhosting.info]. Seems many people have been wising up to overpaying for inferior service and are transfering their domains.

    The fastest growing registrar [webhosting.info] happens to be GoDaddy.com, where I moved all my domains to several years ago.

    You have to keep watching that bang/buck ratio in registrars, webhosting - in all things. You stay with one provider of anything too long and chances are you'll end up paying higher static prices for the convenience of not looking around at the competition once in a while...

  • I think those figures are misleading. What about those registrars that automatically generate a home page for you? Are those included in the tally? And what about squatters that just put up a generic search page? There's too many variables for those numbers to be very useful.

  • Unfortunately, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spoing (152917) on Friday December 03 2004, @10:45AM (#10986605) Homepage
    we now expect that of that 66 million, 90% are probably like this [linkfarm.org] and not as they should be. [linkfarm.com]

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