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by Robert Jaques

Renewal volumes and overall growth drive up domain name business

Strong growth in domain registrations saw 2003 end as a record year for web domain registrations, according to domain name registry VeriSign.

Total domain name registrations reached an all-time high of 60 million, growing 16 per cent in 2003.

With 52 per cent of all registrations, .com and .net represent the most popular domain names. More than 30.4 million domain names are currently registered as either .com or .net, with more than 1.7 million of those added during the last three months of 2003.

But Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) account for a growing portion of overall domain names and currently represent 40 per cent of all registrations.

The majority of ccTLDs were registered in Europe, with the top 10 ccTLDs accounting for 71 per cent of all ccTLD registrations.

Rusty Lewis, executive vice president of VeriSign's naming and directory services, said in a statement: "The report shows how domain name registrations are increasing across the board.

"In October 2003, more than 1.5 million domain names were registered, which represents the highest number of registrations for any single month in the history of the internet."