Folks at Pingdom have put together a nice little map of the top 20 DNS servers in the world, and have one conclusion: US is king, with only two of the top 20 DNS servers outside of the US. Interestingly, they point out that DNS servers are pretty evenly distributed on the two coasts, though some other states make an appearance.
It’s common for non-US companies and individuals to host their websites in the US. They do this both for the often more reliable infrastructure and perhaps more importantly to take advantage of the lower price levels offered by US hosting companies.
3 comments so far
4:33 AM PT
I noticed the referenced article only included .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info TLDs. Without ccTLDs (country specific), the conclusion that the US is king is based on pretty weak data. I am not saying it would not prove to be if the were included, but this just seems horribly incomplete.
8:00 AM PT
It’s more flawed than that. Their basis is ‘hosted domain names’, and 90% of .com domains receive somewhere between zero and marginal traffic. Thus, this is more a measure of where speculators host/buy their domains, and nothing else.
3:13 AM PT
Y’know, Om .. most of the top DNS servers (by that, I assume you mean “nameservers”) are controlled by so-called “domain tasters”, or as Godaddy’s Bob Parsons prefers it, “domain kiters”
http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html
Kiters register, drop and then re-register hundreds of thousands of domains at a time .. all to milk them for pay per click traffic and arbitrage domain renewal fees. And possibly sell one of those squatted domain names to some poor schlub who actually wants it but is simply human rather than an automated script at a tasting company.
–srs
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