Posts tagged "dns"

19 posts found.

September 05, 2026 28 min read

How Long the Internet Remembers: 43.6 Billion DNS Answers, 40 Months of TTLs, and the Two Companies That Set the Cache Clock for a Third of the Web

We kept the exact TTL of every A record in 28 full crawls of the DomainsProject corpus, April 2023 to August 2026 — 43.6 billion DNS answers, 6.9 billion of them the address record of a registrable domain. The share of domains whose address expires in five minutes or less rose from 21.27% to 27.28%, and among live (non-parked) sites from 23.00% to 34.03%, almost all of it since March 2025. But 60.8% of surviving domains publish the same value 40 months later: GoDaddy's domaincontrol.com (mode 600) and Cloudflare (mode 300, 89% of its zones) set the number for a third of the web, and Cloudflare alone accounts for 47% of every domain at five minutes or less. For DNS and platform operators, SRE and incident-response teams, and Internet measurement researchers.

August 20, 2026 39 min read

MX Flux: Sixteen Months of Email Records for 422 Million Domains — 71% Never Touched Their MX, Google's Lead Grows Without Switchers, and 13 Million Domains Now Refuse Mail

We followed the MX record of every apex domain across eleven full crawls, April 2025 - August 2026 (421.9 million apexes). 70.8% of mail-capable domains sit on the bit-identical MX record set sixteen months later; provider switching runs under 1% a month. Google Workspace's lead over Microsoft 365 widened at every single pass (1.28 to 1.43 by domain count) - yet direct switching between the two is a wash; the gap is made by new domains, which arrive 2.3-to-1 for Google, while Microsoft wins the migrations out of self-hosting. Null MX quadrupled from 3.4M to 13.4M domains, and 77% of it is one aftermarket platform's zone template. For email and security teams, hosting providers, and Internet measurement researchers.

July 24, 2026 29 min read

The News Cycle Has a Domain Footprint: Five Trending Events, One Week, and the Registration Waves That Did — and Didn't — Follow

We mapped a week of Google Trends spikes (US + Canada) against our Newly Observed Hostnames feed. A brand-new AI model was followed by a clean launch-day lookalike wave; a breach at a household-name AI company saw no measurable wave at all; and a two-hour Instagram outage saw none either — its phishing lives on free-hosting subdomains a registration feed never sees. Of 195 event-matched lookalikes, 94% resolve but only 30% are provisioned for email. For SOC teams, brand-protection researchers, and threat-intelligence analysts.

July 23, 2026 22 min read

Who Moves the World's DNS: 15 Months of Delegation Flux, a One-Month Million-Domain Migration, and the Nameservers That Outlive Their Owners

We followed the NS delegation of every apex domain across nine full crawls, April 2025 - July 2026 (404 million apexes). 61% of the web kept the exact same nameservers for fifteen months; operator switching runs at 2.3% a month; and the biggest moves were corporate re-plumbs - GoDaddy consolidating 2.1 million NameFind domains onto Afternic, Namecheap shifting 1.1 million parked names to an undocumented platform in one month. Meanwhile 339,000 domains still delegate to the retired Dan.com. For DNS operators, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.

July 18, 2026 21 min read

The SaaS Ledger: 15 Months of TXT Records, a 625x AI Adoption Curve, and Five Million Tokens Moved by One Corporate Decision

We re-classified 18 billion DNS TXT queries across ten full crawls (April 2025 - July 2026) and turned the SaaS verification-token census into a time series. Anthropic tokens grew 625x to 131,812 apexes. The Dan.com shutdown moved five million marketplace tokens. Microsoft 365's domain share is flat while Google's climbs. And across every major vendor, only 19-29% of token disappearances are deliberate cleanup - the rest is domain death. For SaaS analysts, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.

July 11, 2026 17 min read

The Restless Aliases: the CNAME Layer re-crawled after 32 Days — 92.5% Held Still, 12.6 Million Rewired or Vanished, and the Biggest Moves Were Made by Platforms, Not People

Two CNAME-typed crawls of 1.9 billion hostnames, 32 days apart: 169 million cross-domain aliases followed by name. 7.5% of the alias layer rewires or disappears in one month, parking lost 1.54M aliases, one Chinese registrar generated 13% of all new aliases — and the three biggest 'migrations' were platforms re-pointing their own chains, dragging half a million customer domains along. For DNS operators, measurement researchers, and anyone who builds on someone else's CNAME.

July 02, 2026 18 min read

The Half-Life of a Domain: We Tracked 181 Million Resolving Websites for 38 Months — 63.5% Are Still Alive

We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.

June 27, 2026 23 min read

Who Controls the Internet in 2026? Four Core Layers, Four Different Owners, and a 92% Single Point of Failure

The first edition of the Internet Concentration Index: a synthesis of four full-corpus, typed-DNS censuses of the same ~3-billion-name dataset, measuring who controls the Internet's core layers one domain at a time. DNS, email, cloud hosting and the CDN/proxy edge each have a different owner — GoDaddy, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare — no single company controls all four, the enterprise giant everyone names (Microsoft) is nearly invisible by domain count, and 92.5% of delegated domains sit on a single point of failure. For policymakers, security teams, and anyone who has watched one outage take down half the web.

June 26, 2026 21 min read

Where the Web Lives, 2023–2026: The Map That Refused to Move

We replayed 26 monthly snapshots of where the world's domains resolve — 38 months of A-record and geoIP data, Apr 2023 to Jun 2026 — counted one domain one vote across tens of millions of apexes per month. The expected story was de-Americanization and cloud consolidation. The data tells a stranger one: the geographic map barely moved. The United States hosted 45.9% of resolving domains in 2023 and 45.2% in 2026. The only line that climbed is the anycast bucket that hides where a domain truly lives, and the only provider that genuinely surged is Amazon, which tripled its footprint while its share of cloud spending fell. This is the first longitudinal post in the series.

June 25, 2026 20 min read

Your Mailbox Provider Is Your Security Policy: Email Authentication, Re-Cut by Who Runs the Mail

We crossed two full-corpus DNS censuses of the same May 2026 crawl — the MX layer that names who runs each domain's mail, and the SPF/DMARC/MTA-STS/BIMI layer that says whether that mail is authenticated. Across 149.8 million mail-capable apex domains, email-authentication posture turns out to be inherited from the provider, not chosen by the owner: security gateways and Microsoft 365 run the credible anti-spoofing stack on 17–19% of their domains, while the four largest registrar-bundled hosts — IONOS, Hostinger, Namecheap, OVH — run it on under 1.2%, and the largest email category on the Internet stops spoofing on just 3.5% of its 46.7 million domains. The 9% that actually resist spoofing are not spread across the Internet; they cluster behind a handful of operators.

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