Internet Host Numbers Top 72 Million: ISC

SINGAPORE (02/11/2000) - The number of Internet hosts worldwide rose 67 percent in 1999 to surpass 72.4 million hosts by the end of the year, according to a survey carried out by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC).

The survey, released today, showed that at the end of 1998, there were 43.2 million Internet hosts registered in the Domain Name System (DNS), a figure that rose to 56.2 million by the end of June 1999 and grew a further 28.7 percent in the second half of the year.

The largest top-level domain is .com, with 24.8 million hosts, followed by .net with 16.8 million hosts and .edu with 6.1 million hosts.

Apart from the U.S., the most-used country domain is Japan's .jp with 2.6 million hosts, followed by the U.K. with 1.9 million hosts, Germany and Canada, each with 1.7 million hosts, and Australia with 1.1 million hosts. Figures for the U.S. are hard to gauge, as most companies use the .com domain and not the .us country domain.

There are now 959,000 .org hosts and 778,000 .gov sites, according to the survey.

After the U.K., and Germany, the countries in Europe with most Internet hosts with country-specific domain names are the Netherlands (821,000), France (780,000), Italy (658,000), Finland (631,000), and Sweden (594,000).

In Asia, Taiwan has the second-highest domain name count with 597,000 hosts, followed by Korea (283,000), Singapore (148,000), Hong Kong (114,000), Mainland China (71,000) and Malaysia (59,000).

In Latin America, Brazil has the highest domain name count with 446,000 hosts, followed by Mexico with 405,000 and Argentina with 142,000.

In Africa, South Africa has 167,000 sites and is the only country on the continent with more than a few thousand hosts.

In Eastern Europe, Russia's .ru domain leads with 215,000 sites, followed by Poland (183,000), Hungary (114,000) and the Czech Republic (113,000).

Smaller countries with a high number of domain name hosts include New Zealand (271,000) and Israel (140,000).

The highest registration rate per head is in Finland, which has an estimated 12,400 .fi-registered hosts per 100,000 people, or around one host for every eight people. Next in line are Norway (9,305 per 100,000), New Zealand (7,765), Sweden (6,760), Denmark (6,480) and Australia (6,123).

Enormous potential for expansion exists in countries such as China and India, with populations of more than 1 billion and host penetration rates of just 5 per 100,000 people in China and 2 per 100,000 people in India.

Table 1: DNS-registered hosts, by year

Year (on Jan. 1) Number of DNS-registered hosts (millions)1993 1.311994 2.211995 5.851996 14.351997 21.821998 29.671999 43.232000 72.40 Source: ISC Table 2: Countries with more than 1,000 DNS-registered hosts per 100,000 peopleCountry Estimated number of DNS-registered hosts per 100,000 Finland 12400Norway 9305New Zealand 7765Sweden 6757Denmark 6480Australia 6123Canada 5684Netherlands 5338Singapore 4933Switzerland 4377U.K. 3531Austria 3412Belgium 3184Taiwan 2833Israel 2602Japan 2112Germany 2088Hong Kong 1900France 1351Italy 1150 Source: ISC, IDG.

ISC can be reached online at http://www.isc.org/.

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