New research has found that two-thirds of all domain names are hosted in the United States. This means that almost twelve times as many domain names are registered in the US as in Germany, which came in at second place.
Ipwalk sorted the location of domain names based on the location of the DNS server they are hosted on. It found there are more than 77 million generic top-level domain (gTLD) names in the world (counting .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain names).
67.23% of these are hosted in the United States, which corresponds to 52,277,677 domain names, making it by far the most dominant country on the Internet, the firm said.
“A contributing factor to the strong US dominance could be that the country’s web hosting industry is both market leading and very competitive on price, with the result that a large number of foreign companies and persons have chosen the United States for their Internet presence,” Ipwalk said.
The top five countries together hold 83.14% of all gTLD domain names. These countries are the United States, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and China, broken down as follows:
United States, 67.23% (52,277,677)
Germany, 5.71% (4,442,041)
Canada, 3.60% (2,802,411)
United Kingdom, 3.37% (2,617,679)
China, 3.22% (2,503,430)
The rest combined, 16.86% (13,111,810)
“The United States will continue to dominate the Internet for the foreseeable future, though up-and-coming IT superpowers such as China are bound to start catching up as their infrastructure improves,” Ipwalk added.
For an Excel file with additional data as well as a diagram of the domain name distribution, visit http://www.ipwalk.com/blog/?p=80.