Nominet – Over 7 Million Names Registered

Nominet, of which we are members, announced a few days ago that they had passed the 7 million domain mark.

While that figure alone is impressive, it’s even more impressive when you consider that they only hit the 6 million mark in 2007!

The strong growth in registrations in the UK namespace is interesting to watch and Nominet aren’t afraid to share quite a lot of their statistics with the public.

In common with a lot of ccTLDs (country code top level domains), there are several specific namespaces (second level)  within *.uk for particular types of organisation. While the most popular is co.uk, which has no restrictions, there are several other second level domains available:

• co.uk – general / business – no restriction and the most popular
• org.uk – non-profit – no restriction
• me.uk – individuals – no restriction
• ltd.uk – UK Limited Company – restricted – UK company details
• plc.uk – UK PLC – restricted
• net.uk – restricted – only open to UK ISPs
• sch.uk – restricted – only open to UK schools

Looking at the montly statistics available from Nominet it’s pretty obvious which second levels are popular.

For the month of July, for example, there were a mere 46 names registered in sch.uk, compared to 135136 co.uk registrations. If you want to put that in perspective, the entire IE namespace is just over 100 thousand domains (108724 names at time of writing)

On a sidenote, the figures do not show how many of the registrations are “virgin” territory and how many are re-registrations ie. names that have gone through the registry’s deletion process.