The DENIC Success Story Continues –Technical Excellence Guarantees Security and Stability

Today, DENIC, the central registry for the German Top Level Domain (TLD), .de, received the eight millionth application for the registration of a domain. DENIC has now still further improved the position of .de as the world’s favourite country code TLD ahead of .uk which has around 3.7 million registrations. The .de domains are also numerically much stronger than nearly all the generic TLDs that are used throughout the world, such as .org, .net, .info and .biz. Only one TLD – .com, with more than 30 million domains – is more intensively used than .de.

DENIC started its work ten years ago with a mere thousand domains – then still in the form of an externally funded project at Karlsruhe University. In the time since then, it has changed its legal form to that of a registered cooperative and today counts more than 200 members, including numerous providers from outside of Germany. DENIC is a non-profit organization that sees its role as that of a neutral service provider benefiting the whole German Internet Community. This situation has led to the development of a highly diversified provider market in Germany, where anyone interested in a domain can find precisely the package that suits them at an attractive price. Statistically, just under one in ten of Germany’s inhabitants has registered a .de domain.

DENIC is one of the really big players in the international domain business on account of its number of domains, its efficiency and its technical excellence. The corollary of this is that DENIC has to face exacting demands and expectations regarding the security and stability of the services it provides, because, if it were to fail, there would no longer be any guarantee of accessing the websites and mailboxes set up under the .de domains. During the whole period of DENIC’s responsibility for the domain administration of the TLD .de, i.e. since 1994, the name servers have been permanently accessible and have never gone down once. This operational reliability is no matter of chance, since DENIC invests several million euros every year in the further expansion of its infrastructure. One example of this is the name-server network it operates, with eleven servers spread over ten locations, not only in Germany and the rest of Europe, but in Japan and the USA too. The increasingly intense use of the Internet means a never-ending growth in the numbers of enquiries for domain information that the name servers have to handle. At peak times, all the name servers together have a throughput of about half a million enquires every minute, and this figure seems set to treble within a period of only two years, so plans are well advanced for the further enhancement of the network. At each location, three servers are to be installed to respond to enquires received from browsers and e-mail programmes.