As per a press release sent out by DENIC, the German .DE registry operator, the 15th million .DE domain was registered today at 12:56pm central European time. The domain was “floristennetzwerk.de” (which translates to FloristNetwork.de).
See the full press release after the jump.
On 18 April 2012 at 12:56 CEST it was registered, the 15 millionth domain
with a .de ending. Its flowery name: floristennetzwerk.de, which means
florists' network. "With my website I want to provide a purchasing portal
for florists to order flowers and plants, avoiding the usual channels via
intermediaries. I am a qualified florist myself and can build on 30 years
of experience.
And since I want to reach the green trade in Germany with my offer, it was
clear to me that I needed a domain under .de. I have the most beautiful
profession in the world. Flowers make people smile and are the only
product that does not really need any marketing." says the domain holder
Alexander Kleerebezem.
He is not alone with his choice. Every month, an average of about 50,000
.de domains is registered with DENIC. If private persons, medium-sized
businesses or international companies doing business in Germany - a .de
domain is first choice for nearly all of them.
From 0 to 15 million: How it all began …
What started in the year 1986 with .de's registration in the IANA database
has evolved into a real success story and made .de the largest ccTLD in
the world.
In the beginning, the domain names are administered by a network operator
located in the USA. In 1988, administration is transferred to the
University of Dortmund that initially handles it rather informally and
simply records the registrations in a manual list. Starting with only six
.de domains, the list soon commences to grow at a continually increasing
pace. About a decade later, time has come to create a sustainable basis
for domain registration and administration. Early in 1997, 37 German
Internet service providers thus found DENIC eG. At that time, about 50,000
addresses are already registered with DENIC - and there is a clear upward
trend. In April 1999, DENIC records an inventory of 500,000 .de domain
names, and in October 1999 the first million-mark is passed. A period of
sharp continual growth up to one million a year follows.
Interest in .de domains still is immense today: "To have one's own
Internet presence is quite attractive for German citizens. Nearly every
sixth of them has their own .de domain. It has always been our special
concern to underscore the importance of .de as a country code. To this
end, we enabled the use of special characters of the German alphabet like
umlauts or letters with accents and the German eszett in domain names.
This makes it easy to identify oneself with the Top Level Domain .de,"
explains Sabine Dolderer, CEO of DENIC. "And of course it also is the
commitment and great performance of our members who offer first-class
service to the end client that has helped us to become the largest country
code Top Level Domain in the world."
On January 12, 2011 at 10:00 CET (4am EST), the German Network Information Center, DENIC, will release nine domains for registration:
dw.de,
e.de,
f.de,
g.de,
hr.de,
sr.de,
x.de,
y.de,
z.de
The domains are being released following the lifting of a cease and desist that resulted in a temporary injunction.
Requests will be accepted on a first come, first serve basis and only via fax. All requests must be submitted using a request form specific to the domain. The form must be faxed to a fax number designated for each domain. Each fax number will be available for a limited 30-minute period. Request forms, fax numbers, and a schedule of fax times are available from DENIC’s Web site.
Each request must be completed accurately and signed properly for it to be accepted. Those requests not completed properly and signed will be rejected. Domains will be released to the first respondents who accurately complete and fax their request.
A limit of one page per fax transmission will be accepted. Respondents should refrain from using a cover page as this will result in a loss of all transmitted pages beyond the first page. A line will be available for test faxes 24 hours prior to the domain release. The number for this test line is: +49 69 24248559
Those respondents with successful domain requests will receive written notification by letter or fax. Respondents must communicate with the DENIC Cooperative administrator by January 26, 2011 who will transfer the domain to the registrant’s registrar of choice. otherwise the domain will be managed by DENICdirect.
Switch, the .CH registry operator announced that they had registered over 1,5 Million .CH domain names on December 1st, 2010.
The latest Verisign Domain Industry Brief (PDF) for November 2010 reports that we have well surpassed the 200 million mark with 201.8 million of registered domains worldwide
According to TLD Source and The Register large parts of the .DE zone file went missing today from 1:30 pm to roughly 2:50 pm. The error shut down potentially over 13 million domains names tied to websites and email addresses using the German domain name extension.
Speculation to the cause of the outage centers around the theory that the zone files may have been uploaded with no data. TLD Source also speculates on their site that the DENIC infrastructure may be outdated .
DENIC acknowledged the problem on their site (German) and will be providing more details. In a statement on another mailing list found cited by The Register, DENIC stated : “Several of the authoritative nameservers for the DE top level domain returned NXDOMAIN responses for a yet to be determined number of DE domains that existed in our registration database,” the post reads. “At [13:45 UTC], all affected servers had either been disabled or fed with an earlier version of the DE zone. Regular operations were eventually resumed at 15:00 UTC.”