True story:
Me in 2019: “Next year, I’ll stop registering domains unless I KNOW for a fact I’m going to do something with them immediately.”
Me on 2nd January: “Oh shiny! I’ll take that domain please.” pic.twitter.com/ACuYeavtEs
— Stacey MacNaught (@staceycav) January 2, 2020
I register a lot of domains – sometimes with a plan, sometimes just because I like the look of something.
Most get kept. Some are sold. Some get dropped (though I have a personal issue with allowing domains to drop that I should probably deal with).
I’m certainly not the only one with a domain hoarding habit and mine is pretty tame compared to that of others.
But as I registered my first new domain of 2020, I did get to wondering about the statistics relating to renewals and dropped domains.
Domain Renewal Statistics
Whoishostingthis.com released a study in December 2019 on this very topic.
They found:
- We keep just 30% of the domains we register
- 41% of domains are simply left to expire
- 29% are registered by other users
So the overwhelming majority of domains you register this year (unless you have the same digital hoarding problem I do) will end up expiring or in someone else’s hands.
With data provided by Whois XML API, Whoishostingthis.com then carried out research into renewal rates by TLD based on a sizeable sample as follows:
| TLD | Sample Size |
| .COM | 796,501 |
| .NET | 84,153 |
| .TOP | 53,691 |
| .ORG | 35,844 |
| .INFO | 17,655 |
| .CN | 7,111 |
| .XYZ | 3,840 |
| .BIZ | 1,205 |
They found:
- The lowest renewal rates were for .cn TLDs, of which just 1.72% are renewed
- At the other end of the scale, 44.24% of .net domains are renewed, making .net the most renewed TLD
| TLD | Renewal Rate |
| .net | 46.31% |
| .org | 44.24% |
| .info | 34.56% |
| .com | 28.09% |
| .xyz | 24.84% |
| .top | 22.22% |
| .biz | 16.60% |
| .cn | 1.72% |
What happens to those domains once the registrant decides not to renew also varies from TLD to TLD.
In all, this data set analysed 1,000,000 domains across the 8 TLDs, meaning over 702,000 of these where not renewed.
Here’s a summary of all their findings:
My Own Stats
I took a little look at my own stats for domains that came up for renewal for me last year.
It’s a much smaller pool. But it seems I have a problem because of 32 domains that came up for renewal for me last year across a range of TLDs, I renewed 30.
Must learn not to hoard domains…
