.NET: 400 Million Hostnames, 13 Million Registrations, and the TLD That Became the Internet's Plumbing
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.