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You are viewing an outdated report. The latest version of this report was published on February 1st, 2025


    
DNS Site Operator
September 1st, 2018

This report details the names and locations of all DNS servers on the internet, as well as the number of domains that are serviced by these servers. In this fashion, we can discover

  • the number of sites hosted by ISPs
  • the number of sites hosted by hosting companies that use an ISP's facilities, but run their own name servers
  • the number of sites hosted by specialty DNS service providers
  • the organizations that choose to operate their own DNS servers rather than to use those of their ISP/hosting provider.

The survey works by determining each month the authoritative name server for each host (and more accurately, each domain) in our survey. We then count the number of domains hosted on each DNS server.

Search
Curious about the size of a the domain set handled by a particular ISP's name servers? Try searching for the ISP's name server. For example, to find Exodus' name servers, try
exodus.

    

Top 20 by Host Name
The top 20 name servers ranked according to the number of domains handled by each name server, with a name server uniquely identified by its fully qualifed name, are shown below.

Name Server Name   Name Server IP   Domains
ns2.exodusgroup.net  66.180.161.32  59
ns1.exodusgroup.net  66.180.166.32  59
sca02.sec.dns.exodus.net    52
dns02.exodus.net  209.1.222.245  41
dns01.exodus.net  209.1.222.244  41
exodus.hipdesign.com  72.52.83.139  35
dns03.exodus.net  209.1.222.246  31
dns04.exodus.net  209.1.222.247  21
exodus.papua.go.id  128.199.253.247  15
ns3.exodushosting.net  69.162.99.242  13
ns4.exodushosting.net  69.162.99.243  13
exodus.gi.co.id  128.199.253.247  6
exodus.entercomp.com  74.87.146.102  4
ns2.exodus-digital.com  176.31.104.91  2
ns2.atp-exodus.com  81.196.169.190  2
ns5.atp-exodus.com  81.196.169.181  2
ns1.atp-exodus.com  185.101.106.1  2
exodus.poulter.de  46.182.19.207  2
exodus.febc.edu.sg  202.150.214.171  2
exodus.icorp.net    2

Survey Limitations
Our survey, while having an impressive 71,716,561 sites and 30,169,490 domains in the data set, does not include all web sites and domains. We only include those that we consider active, which, by our definition, means we found the site via a link from somewhere else. Sites not linked by anyone are by definition not included in the survey.

We also actively drop sites out of the survey that fail to respond 3 consecutive months to our HTTP queries. So, while a DNS server might still respond with information for a domain, if there is no active web site that we can reach for the domain in question, then the domain is not included in this survey at all, even if it still has other functioning services (such as email).



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