Number of registered .com domains set to touch 100 million

The Internet is constantly expanding and so are the number of domains. The most popular domain - .com counter will hit the 100 million mark soon. There are roughly 98 million .com domains registered so far. At this pace, 100 million should come up in a few months from now, maybe even by the end of the year. The first of the .com domains were registered way back in 1985 since when the DNS (Domain Name System) has been around. Pingdom, the source of the story has some stats on the growth of the number of domains. For example, in 1985, there were 6 .com domains registered, which grew to 9,005 in 1995. Between then and 2000, that number grew to a little more than 21 million and 61 million by 2005. Five years on, in 2010, that number was roughly 91 million.

Explosive growth since 1995 (Image credit: Registrar Stats)

The source of all the data are sites such as VB.com, Verisign and Registrar Stats. The number of registrations has only always grown except during early 2000 when there was a slight dip noticed. Some sudden dips in domain registrations were also noticed between 2006 and 2008. This is a period where some domains were registered temporarily and used for a few days to gauge the traffic visiting that domain. This is a practice that's called ‘domain tasting’.

Cover image credit: Getty Images