The past two information gathering runs showed that GoDaddy is the world largest ISP, but I was curious who else falls into the “Top ISP” category as determined by consumer shopping habits. To do this I’ve used my resolved IP database of 124 million domains and an ISP database from MaxMind. The results are pretty interesting, and it clearly shows that a small number of ISPs are definitely doing something right, which is causing many consumers to vote with their dollars in those ISPs favor. As usual the information is shown in graph form, to filter down the data to just the large providers I’ve set a minimum at 100,000 domains, leaving me with just 122 ISPs. The image below shows the break-down of the Top 25. If you click on it, you will be able expand the chart to 50,100 or the entire list in a form of a bar chart, or explore the pie chart that includes %s. Since we already know GoDaddy is #1, I will skip them over them and focus on the next largest 3. At #2, we have The Planet, a Texas based data-c...

As part of my on-going domain informatics coverage, I am now publishing some additional information that I’ve been able to gather in the last few days. I am making available two additional geographic chats that breakdown the domain distribution by top world cities. The first chart a preview of which can been below (click to see full, browse-able/zoomable version) shows the Top 150 cities, by domain distribution. These cities represent a total 91.3% of some 102 million domains that could be resolved to a city level. The most popular city in the world, with 26.4 million domains calling it home is Scottsdale, Arizona in United States. Which is not entirely surprising, given that it is the hometown on GoDaddy, world’s largest domain provider/hosting company. This coincidentally means that Arizona, which had won the US state domain count contest with 26.7 million domains in our previous round of statistics, is entirely due to GoDaddy. The 2nd largest city is San Francisco, with a respectable 14.3 million d...

I recently re-started the process or aggregating PHP usage data and first sample of small dataset (about 10 million domains) has been the subject of my PHP Advent article. Now, I've started the process of collecting the data on the full data set which comprises of 124 million domains that represent the entirety of .com, .net, .biz, .info, .us, .sk and .org TLDs. The first step of the process has been resolving all of these domains, which is now complete. The next step is fetching the server information, which began, but will take some time to finish. However, even from the domain revolving data there is a lot of useful data to be gleamed, which is what I am now publishing. My first focus was on the world-wide distribution on these TLDs, which at least for me held a few surprises. First of all, unsurprisingly US has the most domains hosted on its soil, however its sheer overwhelming of other countries is quite impressive, and stands at just over 89 million domains, 71% of all domains!. In 2nd place is...

I was buying 2 monitors for the office today, when a came to paying the bill I discovered a rather nasty surprise. It seems that the Ontario government has decided to apply a $12.03 per monitor recycling tax as part of their EOS program. It looks like our liberal provincial government is always on a look out to grab more of our money, so they can spend it on idiotic initiatives such as eHealth.

After reading about rev="canonical" and all the hoopla about domain shorteners, I've decided to see how short of a domain I could get for my blog to avoid having people needing to use things like tinyurl etc... to reduce the lengths of URLs. The goal was to get a 2 letter domain with a 2 letter extension, an easy solution seemed to be the .me extension (Montenegro), but alas I could not find a single registrar that would allow a 2 letter domain registration (ia or ai, my initials). It seems most registrars or resellers use generic libraries that no matter what disallow registration of domains