About HosterStats.com
HosterStats.com provides domain name registration statistics and searchable historical DNS database for almost 500 Million active and deleted domains in the .com / .net / .org / .biz / .info / .mobi / .asia / .ie / .eu / .uk Top Level Domains and also the new gTLDs. The data from these extensions processed monthly.
HosterStats.com also tracks the domain statistics for 1.5 million active domain name hosters based on nameservers and the historical set of hosters is over 5 million hosters. The historical coverage of domain tracking and hoster statistics stretches back to 2000. This is also the only domain statistics site tracking .mobi and .asia TLDs.
The fully searchable database of active and deleted domains is live and searchable via the single search box on each page. The statistical section will go online in the next few days. In the meantime, any domain belonging to a hoster is identified and the results page will also show year during which a hoster's nameservers were active.
Each time a domain is checked, the history of that domain in other extensions will also be shown in the cross-TLD comparison. So if you are looking for the history of a particular .com domain, the database will also show you the parallel history of the domain in .net, .org, .biz, .info, .mobi, .asia, .ie, .eu and .co.uk. It also checks the current nameservers of any domain that is searched.
HosterStats.com concentrates on domain and hoster statistics. It does not scrape or store whois data. If you wish to check the WHOIS for a particular domain, the whois links on navigation bar on the left of each the page are the links to the registry whois lookups for each extension.
HosterStats.com is really an extension of the work that went into building the WhoisIreland.com website and search engine in late 1999 and early 2000. The problem was that the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Altavista were really bad at associating websites with countries and Ireland, having a realtively small internet footprint, (tens of thousands of domains rather than the hundreds of thousands it has now), was particularly badly served. The relatively clueless efforts by the search engines were based on the location of the IP address and the country extention. One search engine had Cuba located in Italy. At the time, the .IE ccTLD was a small shadow of what it is now and a large percentage of Irish websites were not hosted on Irish IP addresses. WhoisIreland set out to determine which websites were Irish. And it did it better than Google, Yahoo, Altavista and Microsoft.
Apparently the site has been considered to have "thin content" in search engine optimisation terms by some utter kludgefest of a search engine algorithm. It does not. Each domain name's hosting history is laid out so that the evolution of a domain name can be seen and understood. And it does that for hundreds of millions of domain names. People who use HosterStats are looking for data and information rather than search engine optimisation practice.
With domain name hosting and statistics dating back to 2000, the website has become an iceberg of content. It is a database backed website and the databases take up Terrabytes of harddrive space. The information architecture of the website is still relatively simple with the domain history for each domain name being accessible via a single URL. The domain hosting statistics are more complex. The initial idea was to break the domain name statistics and transactions for each hoster down over a number of pages for each hoster and replicate that for each year. In addition, a historical long view page for each hoster was also provided. This has become somewhat unwieldy over the last ten years and a new format will be introduced in the next few weeks. It will be simpler and will provide a single webpage view for the key statistics for each hoster.
In addition to the domain name hosting statistics and history, HosterStats has also been tracking domain name registrar statistics. Over the next few weeks, this data will be added to the website. It is multi-year data and will also be available in other formats. This covers all ICANN accredited registrars and ICANN gTLDs.
Some of the methodology, theory and general thinking behind the site appears on my blog on Knowledge From Numbers though the posting frequency can be somewhat aperiodic. It is in the process of being moved to a new server.
John McCormac - 20170117 - jmcc @ hosterstats.com Twitter.com/JMcCormac