Posts tagged "longitudinal"

2 posts found.

July 02, 2026 18 min read

The Half-Life of a Domain: We Tracked 181 Million Resolving Websites for 38 Months — 63.5% Are Still Alive

We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.

analysis dns survival longitudinal dead-web tld-trends freenom domain-economics dataset
June 26, 2026 21 min read

Where the Web Lives, 2023–2026: The Map That Refused to Move

We replayed 26 monthly snapshots of where the world's domains resolve — 38 months of A-record and geoIP data, Apr 2023 to Jun 2026 — counted one domain one vote across tens of millions of apexes per month. The expected story was de-Americanization and cloud consolidation. The data tells a stranger one: the geographic map barely moved. The United States hosted 45.9% of resolving domains in 2023 and 45.2% in 2026. The only line that climbed is the anycast bucket that hides where a domain truly lives, and the only provider that genuinely surged is Amazon, which tripled its footprint while its share of cloud spending fell. This is the first longitudinal post in the series.

analysis dns hosting geography aws cloudflare cloud longitudinal dataset