The number of registered domain names keeps growing, with five million domain names added in the final quarter of 2013, reports Verisign in their latest Domain Name Industry Brief. The number of registered domains was 271 million globally at the end of 2013. For the full year, registrations grew by 18.5 million, or 7.3 percent, year over year.In the market leading TLD when it comes to registrations, .com grew to 112 million registrations, while .net grew to 15.2 million. Their combined 127.2 million registrations represent a five percent increase for 2013. For the final quarter of 2013 new .com and .net registrations totalled 8.2 million, slightly higher for the same quarter in 2012 when registrations grew by 8.2 million.The ten largest TLDs at the end of 2013 but with current registration figures were, in order, .com (113.17m), .tk (Tokelau – 22.10m)+, .de (Germany – 15.75m), .net (15.18m), .uk (United Kingdom – 10.55m), .org (10.43m), .cn (China – 10.29m), .info (5.79m), .ru (Russian Federation – 4.93m) and .nl (Netherlands – 5.45m).*Total ccTLD registrations were approximately 123.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2013 with the addition of 3.9 million domain names, or a 3.3 percent increase compared to the third quarter according to the report. This is an increase of approximately 13.3 million domain names, or 12.1 percent, from a year ago.Among the 20 largest ccTLDs, two exceeded four percent overall quarter-over-quarter growth: China and Tokelau. This marks four straight quarters where China (21.1 percent) and Tokelau (7.1 percent) have exceeded 4 percent growth.As of 31 December, there were 283 global ccTLD extensions that are delegated in the root (including Internationalised Domain Names), with the top 10 ccTLDs comprising 65.6 percent of all ccTLD registrations.During the fourth quarter of 2013, Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 82 billion across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 100 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 0.9 percent and the peak decreased 5.5 percent. Year over year, the daily average increased 6.4 percent and the peak decreased 19.2 percent.In a plug to encourage registrants to consider .com domains instead of another gTLD including the hundreds of new gTLDs that will soon be available or a ccTLD, Verisign provides the number of possible domains that are available from four to 13 characters. For four character .com domains, there are over 845,600 combinations still available. Undoubtedly most of these are for domains that are random combinations of letters and numbers. And when it gets to the possible number of 13 character .com domains available, Verisign report there are over 230.5 quintillion.As the Internet continues to evolve, it is crucial for enterprises to have a powerful and resilient infrastructure that maintains 24/7 availability. “DNS Outages: The Challenges of Operating Critical Infrastructure” provides a high-level overview of the implications of DNS outages and the importance of staying ahead of threats.Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief can be downloaded from www.verisigninc.com/en_US/innovation/dnib/index.xhtml. * The statistics come from registry websites, registrarstats.com and domain-recht.de and uses current statistics as the Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief does not provide figures apart from for .com and .net. + Revenue for .tk domains is generated by monetising the expired domain names. Domains that are no longer used by the registrant or are expired are taken back by Freenom and the residual traffic is sold to advertisement networks. Next to this primary source of income, additional revenue will be generated by offering digital white labeled services, such as hosting packages, SSL certificates and others, to free domain name users. Source: www.businesswire.com/news/home/20131216006048/en/Freenom-Closes-3M-Series-Funding.