How many .com domains are available?

http://blog.nametoolkit.com/

by brodd • 15 years ago

63 95 15 years ago

blog.nametoolkit.com

jeggers5• 15 years ago

95,743,705 are currently being used. The amount of available domains is virtually unlimited due to the fact that you could have 'dsdijhfjkdf.com' as a domain.

JacobAldridge• 15 years ago

And, for an estimated $150K and some ICAAN paperwork, www.google.dsdijhfjkdf could be yours!

GMali• 15 years ago

And out of those, how many are parked?

nt_mark5• 15 years ago

That's hard to analyse, however web traffic follows a power law distribution, http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/adamicglot.... So, outside the top 100k sites in terms of traffic you could expect it's either parked or idle domains.

hessenwolf8• 15 years ago

It is a study we would like to do. The plan is to select a random sample of domains for each length and query a source, e.g., Alexa, show a confidence interval by length for domain traffic.

The stats hypothesis would be to test whether length can be used as a predictor of traffic.

ohashi23• 15 years ago

Finding good domains still available is a more interesting problem than just saying there are some.

nt_mark5• 15 years ago

Indeed, same can be said for good usernames

djcapelis• 15 years ago

There are already people in that business... the question the blog entry posed was how successful they've been in squatting on all the good domains.

ohashi23• 15 years ago

There are always new approaches and methods to find them.

lachenmayer• 15 years ago

Shouldn't ICANN's decision to allow the registration of new TLDs more or less solve this problem?

bad_user• 15 years ago

No, those new TLDs will be more or less worthless.

gmaslov• 15 years ago

Well, worthless to everyone but ICANN.

troutwine• 15 years ago

I haven't kept up on the debate. Why would new TLDs be worthless, approximately?

hessenwolf8• 15 years ago

Our point is that there is not really a problem with shortage...

ez772• 15 years ago

Is there an official channel to compile registered domains?

growt• 15 years ago

DNS is a good start. You'll be missing some but not much.

ez772• 15 years ago

Do you mean brute-force trail and error for every possible domain? That looks daunting, and an easy way to have your IP address blocked.

nt_mark5• 15 years ago

Verisign com zone file, available for free upon request

hessenwolf8• 15 years ago

We needed to fax a form to them though. Travelling to the nineties was the hardest part of setting it up.

breck4• 15 years ago

Anyone know where you can download this without sending a fax?

breck4• 15 years ago

How can I get a recent copy of the Verisign .com TLD master zone file?

You need to send a fax to get it from their website so I figure there's got to be a quicker way(http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...)

UPDATE: I downloaded the forms. Filled them out. Signed up for a HelloFax $4.99 account. Created a new fax using HelloFax. Uploaded the 2 documents. Attached my signature. And sent it. 26 minutes after making my original comment. Not too hard :). I'll update this when I hear back.

UPDATE 2: You can also pay $24.95 a month and get them here: http://www.premiumdrops.com/zones.html

yahelc• 15 years ago

If you're not contractually prohibited from sharing it, it'd be great if you could share it here.

breck4• 15 years ago

Sorry I believe I am contractually prohibited from sharing sadly. Unless someone can read the fine print and provide me with a different opinion.

jimmyjim• 15 years ago

I am thoroughly unhappy about good .com domains being squatted. I can't say how many times a perfectly good domain that I would have liked to start an internet service on is being squatted with a page of "contact me if interested in domain" message -- and it's more or less useless trying to contact these persons, as they'll not reply, or demand absurd amounts for the domain.

rooshdi22• 15 years ago

Along with patent reform, I'm hoping there's some sort of domain squatting reform down the line. There are way too many squatters doing absolutely nothing with way too many good domains. The domain system right now seems to be working against creating value for the public and more towards creating value for the squatters. There should be some guidelines put in place to ensure domains are being purchased for the benefit of online service creation. This, however, would require a dramatic overhaul of the current domain registering process. Hopefully, this whole issue becomes less relevant as domain names become more obsolete due to web app marketplaces such as the chrome web store, but that may take some time to come to fruition.

baudehlo• 15 years ago

How would you define squatting though? It's a really tough issue to legislate.

masterzora3• 15 years ago

How do you define "online service creation"? Does my personal blog qualify? What about the period of time where I didn't serve anything to the web but was using my server to run a personal email & jabber server? What about the time where I didn't even do that and was using my server as a remote shell for me and a couple friends? What about when I was running it just for me?

Should it matter that nobody else should have any interest in masterzora.net since I've (almost; there are a couple silly outliers) uniquely held that handle for over a decade?

Every "simple" solution I've heard for the squatter problem is only simple because it's focusing on a simple case.

hessenwolf8• 15 years ago

Us too - our original business name got squatted because we searched for it in the wrong engine. There are always other reasonable options, though.

nazar• 15 years ago

Just a week ago, one of my co-founders accidentally leaked the domain name of the start up we were working on. It's a bit of a problem to register domain from where we are, so the time when I got to the registration, I found out that the domain name was taken by one of the local companies. We called them, and they asked us to come and negotiate. When we went to their office, the guy told us that he heard about our start up and he bought the domain for fun, he wanted to see us coming to his office and beg for the domain. Eventually we got the transfer code, but the whole experience was not pleasant.

rlpb4• 15 years ago

I think domains should just be more expensive, with the money going towards something useful. Would you prefer to pay $200/year for a domain or $20000 to get it from a squatter and then $5/year to keep it?

The economy is the system we've used to balance supply and demand for centuries. We should use it to sort the .com mess out.

Companies can afford to pay significantly more for their domains. Personal users can easily use subdomains at a lower cost if they wish, as DNS intended.

To implement, just ramp up the cost of gTLDs every year.

masterzora3• 15 years ago

As someone running a personal .net, I much prefer the $10/yr I'm paying right now. I might be able to afford $200/yr now that I'm working, but I certainly would not have been able to keep that up in college. I don't think cutting students out from being able to have personal domains is at all a good solution.

valisystem• 15 years ago

I don't think money is the right solution, there is many other uses for the internet than profitable ones.

ohashi23• 15 years ago

gTLD prices do go up yearly (7% for .com).

Who captures this extra money for doing nothing? VeriSign just gets this added to their bottom line with no competition in the contract. Is that fair? The fact is, the cost to provide this service is very low and going down, but prices are increasing. There will be economic surplus somewhere, the question is whether it's supply or demand side. I think demand side is far more appropriate. It also allows everyone access to the domain name system. $200 may seem like nothing to you, but in other countries that can be a lot of money. There isn't a shortage of domain names by any means, why create a higher barrier and who does it really benefit?

tzury• 15 years ago

I was looking for the zone file during last week. Gladly, it is a fax away.

nt_mark5• 15 years ago

I believe ICANN is looking to reform zone file access as part of the new gTLD system it's initiating.

http://securityskeptic.typepad.com/the-security-skeptic/2010...

edwardy20• 15 years ago

If only people would stop automatically assuming .com is the only way to go, we wouldn't have a domain shortage problem.

highace• 15 years ago

Sadly, they hold the most credibility. Everyone's heard of .com, specifically the casual web users or less tech savvy. I tried .co once, but when I passed a mention of the domain on to someone else, what did they type in? That's right, .com.

Locally (.co.uk for me) there's many more available, but that makes it harder to target a global audience, and also as above, a lot of people tend to try .com first, potentially introducing them to a competitor.

jacobbijani• 15 years ago

Barmkin.com is a pretty great domain name, actually.

scarmig• 15 years ago

Shortages are a sign of a flawed market.

What needs to be done is something similar to the radio spectrum; require a regular bidding process on a given domain (or, more likely, the set of domains that are in-demand).

Squatting becomes a less desirable business when you've got to pay $100/year for an in-demand domain.

hessenwolf8• 15 years ago

I used to work in a spectrum research lab (http://www.ctvr.ie/). I didn't get the impression the auctioning was working all that well.

cappaert• 15 years ago

I was interested a while back in finding short (5 or 6 letter) .com domains still available. Wrote a little script to do a bulk check at Godaddy.

There are a few variables you can alter in my script:

- pre: any text BEFORE the consonant-vowel-consonant string

- suf: any text AFTER the string

- ext: the domain name extension (defaults to .com if left blank)

- max: the maximum number of domain name results (starting at a random character)

Since GoDaddy limits the bulk check to 500, the quickest way to do a domain check is to run the script setting the max at 500, then just copy and paste the result in the bulk domain lookup.

Couple different examples:

http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?suf=it&ma...

http://tonycappaert.com/projects/domaingen.php?pre=go&su...

Paste the result in the Godaddy bulk check at http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx

How many .com domains are available?

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