Methodology

Two clocks

This site runs on two independent data cycles, and conflating them is the easiest way to misread it.

Daily

Domain counts, adds and drops, DNSSEC and nameserver breakdowns. Derived from registry zone files, refreshed every 24 hours.

Monthly, ~3 months late

Everything attributed to a registrar: market share, transfers, deletes, renewals. Zone files contain no registrar information whatsoever, so this can only come from ICANN's monthly registry reports, which publish about a quarter in arrears. Every registrar figure on this site is stamped with the month it describes.

How a domain is counted

A name is counted as a registered domain when it appears in the TLD's zone file as a direct child of the TLD with at least one NS record, or a DS record. That is the conventional definition for zone-derived counts and it has consequences worth stating:

• Registered names with no nameservers delegated are not counted — they are not in the zone.
• Premium and registry-reserved names appear only once they actually resolve.
• Names in a redemption or pending-delete state usually still resolve, so they still count until removed.
• Counts can therefore run slightly below a registry's own "domains under management" figure. Where both exist, the monthly reports are the registry's own number and the zone count is ours.

Adds and drops are the exact set difference between consecutive days' name lists, not an estimate. The first day a TLD is ingested has no previous day to compare against, so it reports no change rather than reporting the whole zone as additions.

How the registry backend is determined

ICANN publishes no mapping from TLD to technical backend, so this site infers it from three public signals, in order of strength:

1. Root nameserver hostnames. A TLD served by *.gmoregistry.net is on GMO's platform.
2. RDAP endpoint from IANA's bootstrap file, which often reveals a shared platform even when nameservers are per-TLD vanity names.
3. Reverse DNS of the nameserver addresses. Brand TLDs almost always use vanity hostnames like a.nic.example, which identify nothing — but the PTR record for those addresses usually names the real platform.

Where several TLDs share infrastructure that no curated fingerprint covers, a backend is created automatically and labelled inferred: the grouping is real evidence, but the name is the shared hostname rather than a company we have verified. TLDs whose infrastructure identifies nothing are left explicitly unattributed rather than guessed at, and counted on the backends page so the totals still add up.

What this site does not measure

• Registrant country. No public source contains it. Zone files have no registrant data and ICANN's monthly reports are per-registrar, not per-registrant. The country page shows where registrars are accredited, which is a different and much weaker claim.
• Prices or renewal rates. Not published by registries in any machine-readable form.
• Whether a domain is "in use". Parking detection is based on nameserver patterns only; nothing is resolved or fetched. The parking figure is a lower bound, since a domain parked on a registrar's ordinary nameservers is indistinguishable from one that is genuinely hosted.
• Legacy gTLDs and ccTLDs. This site is scoped to the new gTLDs. Other TLDs are tracked in the database for completeness but are not featured.

Sources

Every source is public and requires no credentials except CZDS. All are probed weekly and drift is alerted on.

Zone data is used under ICANN's CZDS terms, which permit analysis but prohibit redistributing zone data. This site therefore publishes aggregate statistics only — it holds no searchable index of domain names, and the name lists used to compute daily adds and drops are deleted after two days.

Live pipeline status

Freshness is not something you should have to take on trust. The status page shows the last successful run of every source, and a source that stops updating is reported there rather than silently serving old numbers as though they were current.