Australia’s country code top level domain (ccTLD), .au, has reached three million registrations as of July 2015, which put it easily within the top 10 ccTLDs.
On average, each million registrations from one to two to three million registrations have occurred every four years with the one millionth registration reached in November 2007 and the two millionth in March 2011.
To mark the milestone, AusRegistry and .au Domain Administration (auDA) have put together the following statistics on .au domains:
- In June 2015, AusRegistry processed 41.2 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries for .au domain names. This is equivalent to approximately 1.4 billion DNS queries per day in the .au zone.
- The average length of a .au domain name is 10-13 characters. Over 38,000 .au domains are 28 characters or longer, with four domain names recording 63 characters (the maximum length allowable).
- Almost 40 percent of .au domain names have been registered for about 2 to 6 years. Seven percent have been registered for more than 10 years.
- About 86 percent of all registered .au domain names are under .com.au.
- New South Wales has the largest number of .au registrations (1 million), followed by Victoria (800,000) and Queensland (600,000).
- .au domain name registrations grew at a rate of six percent from July 2014 to July 2015.
- DNS Security Extensions, a security extension facilitating the digital signing of web communications, is now available for .au domain names — helping to ensure the integrity and authenticity of transmitted data.
The largest domain registrations…
- .tk (Tokelau): Largest ccTLD with largely free registrations, with more than 25 million domain names registered
- .de (Germany): Largest ccTLD with registrations paid for, which is soon to pass the 16 million mark
- .com: Largest TLD, which is closing in on 118 million registrations
According to Chris Disspain, CEO of auDA, the reason Australian businesses and consumers have confidence in .au domain names is that they’re the best way to identify oneself as a trusted Australian source online. The .au domain name is like Australia’s home on the web so more and more Australian people and companies are gravitating towards .au names that allow them to shop, work and play online with confidence.
The .au namespace has been ably supported by AusRegistry, the technical registry provider for the said namespace and the official .au registrars providing the retail channel.
Meanwhile, according to Adrian Kinderis, CEO of AusRegistry, the technology behind .au has helped position it as one of the most trusted domains on the web. The significant investment AusRegistry has made in the infrastructure and stability of the .au Registry has produced a robust and secure platform which is recognised for its best-of-breed architecture. This is one of the reasons .au has achieved 100 percent uptime throughout his term. He emphasised that AusRegistry’s sole purpose is to ensure the .au registry is flawlessly performing its role as a mission-critical, essential service infrastructure asset for Australia’s digital economy.
Let’s wait and see if .au will reach four million registrations in 2019 according to the pattern.
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