The Total domain name registrations around the world have reached a whopping 329.3 million as of December 31, 2016, VeriSign has revealed in its latest report.
The report notes that the fourth quarter of 2016 saw addition of nearly 2.3 million domains – a 1.8 per cent increase over the third quarter of the same year. The total number of domain name registrations include all the top-level domains (TLDs), VeriSign said. The Internet Security company said that year-over-year the domain name registrations increased by 6.8 per cent to 21 million.
The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 142.2 million domain name registrations in the domain name base in the fourth quarter of 2016. This represents a 1.7 percent increase year over year. The .com domain name registrations equaled 126.9 million while the .net registrations stood at 15.3 million.
New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 8.8 million during the fourth quarter of 2016. In the fourth quarter of 2015, new .com and .net domain name registrations totaled 12.2 million.
During the fourth quarter of 2016, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was approximately 143 billion queries per day across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of nearly 398 billion queries.