Registered .com domain names nears 100M mark

A major Internet milestone is in the offing, as the number of registered .com domain names nears 100 million and may reach this high point before yearend, a website monitoring firm said. Pingdom said .com, the Internet’s favorite top-level domain, is by far the world’s largest top-level domain as it accounts for around 45 percent of all domain names. “It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go ... We will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year," it said. The .com domain, which had been around since 1985, is one of the original top-level domains on the Internet. Pingdom showed statistics showing only six .com domains were registered as of December 1985, 223 as of December 1990, and 9,005 in December 1995. But this exploded in December 2000 to 21,023,720; 61,624,166 in December 2005; and 91 million in December 2010. "Quite amazing, isn’t it? Especially when you compare today’s numbers with the modest beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the World Wide Web (you may have heard of it) made everyone flock to the Internet," it said. A separate article on The Next Web noted few would have foreseen that kind of growth 26 years ago. — TJD, GMA News