August 24, 2006

In a report released Aug. 21, recent statistics show that about 67 percent of all domain names are hosted in the United States, according to Internet statistics provider Ipwalk.

The company says there are currently more than 77 million generic top-level domain names in the world and a little over 67.2 percent of these are hosted in the U.S., which corresponds to 52,277,677 domain names, making it by far the most dominant country on the Internet.

The United States has almost twelve times as many domain names as Germany (in second place) with 5.71 percent or 4,442,041 domain names.

The research firm says 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.

The top five countries together hold 83.14 percent of all gTLD domain names, with United States at the top, followed by Germany, then Canada with 3.6 percent, the United Kingdom with 3.37 percent and finally China with 3.22 percent.

Ipwalk says with such a strong and established Web hosting industry, 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.

Source: The WHIR