The king, from the daily zone file: names added and dropped, net growth, and the weekly rhythm of the largest domain market.
Every day we take the full .com zone file and compare it with the day before. Names that appear are new registrations and re-delegations; names that vanish are the drops, the expiries and the holds. The difference is how fast the king is actually growing, which is a different question from how many names are registered.
Over the 209 days we have tracked, the zone has changed by +8,192,028 names net. The weekday rhythm below is real: registrations follow the working week, drops follow registrar batch schedules.
| Day | Added, avg | Dropped, avg | Net, avg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 129,867 | 117,077 | +12,791 |
| Tuesday | 184,431 | 124,824 | +59,607 |
| Wednesday | 190,830 | 130,611 | +60,220 |
| Thursday | 188,380 | 136,411 | +51,969 |
| Friday | 183,449 | 134,723 | +48,727 |
| Saturday | 169,691 | 138,449 | +31,242 |
| Sunday | 134,608 | 124,108 | +10,500 |
A day's figures reflect the zone published that morning, so they mostly describe the previous day's activity.
| Month | Added | Dropped | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2026 (7 days) | 1,270,335 | 921,942 | +348,393 |
| Sep 2026 | 5,377,285 | 3,981,029 | +1,396,256 |
| Aug 2026 | 5,175,151 | 4,066,880 | +1,108,271 |
| Jul 2026 | 5,207,034 | 3,955,070 | +1,251,964 |
| Jun 2026 | 5,045,412 | 3,863,506 | +1,181,906 |
| May 2026 | 4,866,317 | 3,613,562 | +1,252,755 |
| Apr 2026 | 4,925,316 | 3,972,912 | +952,404 |
| Mar 2026 (21 days) | 3,386,427 | 2,686,348 | +700,079 |
Every name in the zone delegates to a nameserver, and the nameserver says what the name is doing. Marketplace and parking servers mean it is for sale or monetised; a registrar's own DNS is a mix of idle names and live sites that never moved their DNS; a content network or cloud DNS means something real sits behind it; a website builder or host means a site. We read the first nameserver of each of the 167,158,039 names and group the providers.
| # | Provider | Group | Names | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | domaincontrol.com | Registrar DNS | 36,256,153 | 21.69% |
| 2 | cloudflare.com | CDN and cloud DNS | 21,537,304 | 12.88% |
| 3 | googledomains.com | CDN and cloud DNS | 7,841,853 | 4.69% |
| 4 | registrar-servers.com | Registrar DNS | 6,113,944 | 3.66% |
| 5 | dns-parking.com | Registrar DNS | 5,206,446 | 3.11% |
| 6 | afternic.com | For sale or parked | 5,031,873 | 3.01% |
| 7 | wixdns.net | Website builders and hosts | 4,824,850 | 2.89% |
| 8 | namebrightdns.com | For sale or parked | 3,521,775 | 2.11% |
| 9 | ui-dns | Registrar DNS | 3,196,283 | 1.91% |
| 10 | hichina.com | Registrar DNS | 2,714,600 | 1.62% |
| 11 | share-dns.com | Registrar DNS | 2,645,492 | 1.58% |
| 12 | awsdns | CDN and cloud DNS | 2,311,451 | 1.38% |
| 13 | nsone.net | CDN and cloud DNS | 2,196,697 | 1.31% |
| 14 | worldnic.com | Registrar DNS | 1,350,889 | 0.81% |
| 15 | bluehost.com | Website builders and hosts | 1,339,749 | 0.80% |
| 16 | ovh.net | Registrar DNS | 1,198,847 | 0.72% |
| 17 | squarespacedns.com | Website builders and hosts | 1,146,076 | 0.69% |
| 18 | wordpress.com | Website builders and hosts | 1,045,115 | 0.63% |
| 19 | porkbun.com | Registrar DNS | 1,020,377 | 0.61% |
| 20 | spaceship.net | Registrar DNS | 954,553 | 0.57% |
| 21 | siteground.net | Website builders and hosts | 943,573 | 0.56% |
| 22 | julydns.com | Website builders and hosts | 860,136 | 0.51% |
| 23 | name.com | Registrar DNS | 823,195 | 0.49% |
| 24 | namefind.com | For sale or parked | 806,224 | 0.48% |
| 25 | dreamhost.com | Website builders and hosts | 771,027 | 0.46% |
| … | … | … | … | … |
| 657 | appraise.net | Appraise.net marketplace | 8,894 | 0.005% |
Grouping is by provider, from a list we maintain. Some providers straddle groups: the large registrars' default servers carry idle names, parked names with ads and working websites alike, so "registrar DNS" overlaps with both "for sale or parked" and "hosts" in practice. "Everything else" is mostly self-hosted and smaller hosts. The nameserver read covers the names that carry a delegation record; the remaining entries in the zone file are glue and DNSSEC-only records, which is why this total sits below the unique-name count above.
The daily drop list feeds our scoring pipeline: every dropped .com is scored, the promising ones are appraised, and the best go into the Drop Feed for plan holders. The nameserver mix above is refreshed every week from the same zone file.