VeriSign: Domain-name registrations keep growing

Domain-name registrations rose 6 percent in the first quarter of 2008, continuing a trend of steady growth, said VeriSign, the company that manages the .com, .net and .tv domain names.

At the end of the first quarter, there were 162 million domain name registrations across all of the top-level domains, or TLDs, VeriSign said Monday in its newest Domain Name Industry Brief. That's a 26 percent increase over the same quarter of 2007, and the quarterly growth is about the same pace as in 2007, VeriSign said.

VeriSign reported 71.4 million domain names registered at the end of 2004, and 105 million domain names registered by mid-2006.

The company processed a peak of more than 50 billion DNS (Domain Name System) queries per day in the first quarter of 2008, compared to an average of 30 billion DNS queries per day in the first quarter of 2007. Each query represents an Internet user accessing a Web site or sending e-mail.

The report also highlights India as a potential growth area. India has more than 41 million Internet users, ranking it eighth among countries in total Internet users, but only about 4 percent of its population uses the Internet, VeriSign said. India is "emerging as an increasingly important country for domain names," the company said in a press release.

"Rapidly emerging regions like India underscore the importance of ensuring that the Internet infrastructure is able to serve every corner of the world," Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of naming services at VeriSign, said in a statement.

At the end of the first quarter of 2008, there were 1.2 million domain name registrations in India, representing a 46 percent growth over the previous year and a 12 percent growth over the previous quarter.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.