Registrar rankings

Domain name registrars and numbers of domains registered at each. The published lists differ in which top-level domains they use; in the frequency of updates; and in whether their basic data is absolute numbers provided by registries, or daily changes derived from Zone files.

They use at maximum sixteen publicly available gTLDs that existed as of December 2008, plus .us. A February 2009 ICANN zone file access concept paper explains that most registries stopped providing zone files in 2005, citing abuse.

Peports include:

§     Monthly  ICANN postsreports created by the registries of sixteen gTLDs. These reports list absolute numbers of domains registered with each ICANN-accredited registrar.

§     Monthly Dotandco.net publishes a list of registrars by volume.

§     Weekly, WebHosting.information, operated by Directi, provides updates ofrankings and total domains for registrars. They include .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info in their statistics. Their statistics and rankings by associating name servers and IP addresses with registrarsrather than using registrars listed in Whois information. It appears that this different basis of measurement, along with the smaller number they track, cause their Total Domain numbers to be lower than other sites.

Yearly DomainTools.com, operated by Name Intelligence, Inc., published registrar statistics

They included .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us in their totals. Although not explicit, they cite "daily changes"(presumably from daily zone files) as the basis for their yearly aggregates.

See also

§                                             Drop registrar

§                                             Domain name registry

§                                             Domain Registries