- but interesting info if someone is bored to do the test
8Q. In the DNS protocol , a query for a domain that is not in the zone returns an NXD response . On average , for how many unique domain names per day do Verisign's .COM servers return an NXD response ?
8A. Over 68 million unique domain names per day receive DNS queries but are not in the zone (almost 2B of the 50B total daily queries)
that means 68 million unregistered domains get 2 billion hits per day (wow , some of those domains would be traffic goldmines , I wonder if VeriSign would sell that list lol)
9Q. Since 1985 , Verisign's registry for .COM and .NET has processed over 1.5 billion new domain name registrations . How many of those registrations are unique names ?
9A. 475 Million (From Data Warehouse) which means about 375 million names were registered at some point but are now available ! At the peak of domain registration , we reached 5 million new registrations on some days .
Not sure about the Domaintools article, maybe they wanted a bit of publicity in advance of the VeriSign Q4 Earnings Report, they were certainly stretching the numbers a bit to get over the headline figure.
I don't think there is any foul play , but I did notice something that kind of "supports" your "pump-up" theory ...
for the last couple of years registrations usually increased 30k-45k per day (new minus deleted) ... on the day it went over the 100M mark the increase (new minus deleted) was ~450k