Domain names break 192 million barrier on 25th anniversary

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It's 25 years since the first domain name was registered and a new report has shown the number has now broken the 192 million mark.

The report, released today by network infrastructure company Verisign, showed an extra 11 million domain names were registered on the internet in the fourth quarter of 2009, taking the number to 15 million in total since the end of 2008 and now quickly approaching 200 million overall.

The well-known .com and .net domain names reached 96.7 million by the end of last year, up seven per cent from the same quarter last year, with a stable renewal rate of 71 per cent – 70.5 per cent in the previous quarter.

The report said: “It took some time for .com to take off. Two and a half years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domain name registrations existed. Then came the '.com boom', with nearly 20 million names registered in the next two years.”

“The emergence of online businesses as well as early speculative activity fuelled the rapid growth,” it added.

The .uk domain is still proving to be popular as the third most registered regional domain after .cn for China and .de for Germany.

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