1991 sure was a long time ago, and yet it was at a certain point nearly 30 years ago now that there was quite literally one – and only one – person on the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee certainly isn’t a household name the way many other technology founders are, but perhaps he should be. If you don’t know of him and can’t see where we are going with this, he’s the man who created the Internet.
A pivotal moment in human history for sure, and especially noteworthy seeing as how his creation has turned out to be an immeasurable blessing for global connectivity and productivity. On the other side, however, it’s done great harm to many people too so maybe it’s the proverbial ‘double-edged sword’ in that regard. I know I’m sure as shoot glad the Internet didn’t exist when I was a teenager.
That said, the significance of what Internet connectivity offers in the way of instant and wide-reaching access to information certainly isn’t lost on us here at 4GoodHosting. Like any good Canadian web hosting provider, the sheer volume of customers we provide with hosting for their sites indicates that people are immensely receptive to what being online can do for their businesses, ventures, or personal interests / avocational pursuits.
More and more people are looking for reliable web hosting in Canada every day, and that’s going to be the same for any country in the world really. Which is the ideal segue into the news we’ll share as our topic this week – not surprisingly, the Internet continues to be increasingly populated!
Big Jump
The last quarter of this current year saw 370.7 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs). That’s an increase of 0.6 million domain name registrations as compared to the second quarter of the year. All this according to VeriSign, who’s a global provider of domain name registry services and Internet infrastructure.
Want an understanding of just how much of a priority people are putting onto going online? Look no further than the fact that domain name registrations have grown by 10.8 million, or 3.0 percent, year over year. No matter what you’re counting, 10.8 ‘new ones’ on average every year is some pretty darn explosive growth.
.com and .net Dominance
This part shouldn’t come as a surprise to the same extent. Country-specific domain extensions like .ca for here in Canada are popular, but not nearly the same way .com and .net ones are. These two had a combined total of 163.7 million domain name registrations in the domain name base as the 2020 3rd quarter ended.
This works out to an increase of 1.7 million domain name registrations, or 1%, compared to the second quarter of 2020. Of those, 6.3 million domain name registrations were for the .com and .net TLDs and that’s worked out to a 4% increase, year over year.
The .com domain name base comes in at 150.3 million domain name registrations, while 13.4 million .net domain names have been registered.
New Registrations for Domain Names
New .com and .net domain name registrations are always arriving too, and between them 10.9 million were registered this year to the end of the 2020 third quarter. That’s in comparison to 9.9 million domain name registrations at the end of the third quarter of 2019.
While these numbers are fairly natural and expected, plus a good sign for the health and vitality of e-commerce around the world, there are increased logistical challenges that come with so many domains with sites hosted on the web.
We would be qualified to talk about those logistics in great detail given the nature of what we do here, but instead we’ll conclude here this week by saying that the best thing that could happen would be if there was a collective movement worldwide to hold people to certain standards regarding how and for what purpose they use the Web.
Lofty thinking for sure, but it’s a part of the bigger picture of what we believe in when it comes to doing good in the world. We’re lucky to have the Internet, and we’d do well to strive to keep it working for the collective good at all times.
