- Home
- Statistics and Research
- Technology
- Domain Renewal Statistics – What Gets Dropped?
Domain Renewal Statistics – What Gets Dropped?
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…
Stacey MacNaught
Stacey is an SEO and content marketing specialist by day. She's the founder of MacNaught Digital, which owns Micro Biz Mag, and has been writing copy for over a decade. She lives in Oldham with her husband and two sons.Tags
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
Recent Articles
Get up to speedLockdown 2021 – Are You Allowed to Work from Your Office?
So here we are once again. A New Year, but the same raging pandemic. And as lockdown 3.0 (technically, but probably only the second "proper" lockdown) is underway, we're greeted with lots of the same guidance very much open to...