April 30, 2026
24 min read
We compared the master DomainsProject corpus (3.12 billion unique hostnames ever observed) against the 17 April 2026 active crawl (1.47 billion currently resolving) and found that 52.9% of the observable web no longer answers the DNS. .com alone holds 808 million dead hostnames; the five Freenom-managed ccTLDs (.tk, .ml, .ga, .cf, .gq) are 99% extinct; the new-gTLD program churns at 75% dead; and a small spine of restrictive ccTLDs — .jp, .it, .de, .nl — sits below 30%.
March 23, 2026
30 min read
We parsed 36.3 million observed hostnames in the .nl namespace — rank #11 of 1,511 TLDs. ISP reverse-DNS from Ziggo, XS4ALL, and Chello accounts for a large share of them. The Netherlands — about 17.9 million people — registered the first active country-code domain in 1986, hosts the world's largest Internet exchange, headquarters RIPE NCC, and produced the DNS software that powers the global root. At roughly 2.03 observed hostnames per resident, .nl is the densest national namespace in Europe, and 71.7% of those hostnames return a live A record — well above the 58.9% whole-namespace rate. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS resolution data.
March 23, 2026
19 min read
We observed 400.8 million hostnames under .net — the #2 namespace on the Internet behind only .com — against roughly 13 million registry registrations, a ~30x gap. .net's hostname mass comes overwhelmingly from provider infrastructure: CDN edge nodes, dynamic-DNS, ISP reverse-DNS, and mail/hosting back-ends that mint subdomains by the thousand. And 72.6% of those names return a live A record, well above the 58.9% whole-namespace rate. The TLD created in 1985 for 'network' organizations became literally the Internet's network layer. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party resolution data.
March 20, 2026
22 min read
We analyzed 3.18 billion observed hostnames across 1,511 TLDs to measure .com's dominance — 1.36 billion hostnames, 42.7% of the namespace, one registry operator, zero competition. But only 57.2% of those .com hostnames return a live A record. What a government-granted monopoly means for infrastructure risk, pricing, and the future of the namespace. Refreshed June 2026 with first-party DNS resolution data.