The company said yesterday that the total number of domains registered surpassed 63 million in the first quarter of the year, a 21% growth on the same quarter last year. This is bigger than at any point in history, VeriSign said.
At the same time, more of these sites are actually getting used than ever before, according to VeriSign’s quarterly Domain Report. The firm says 72% of domains now resolve to a web site, compared to 55% at the end of 2002.
This indicates that the speculative purchase of domain names that fueled much of the growth in the late nineties has been replaced by real Web sites and e-mail boxes, to which real people are connecting, VeriSign said.
VeriSign, which often claims during regulatory tussles that its .com business faces serious competition from overseas domains, also said that 40% of registered domains are in country-code domains (ccTLDs) such as .uk and .de.
