Posts tagged "infrastructure"

18 posts found.

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 03, 2026 20 min read

The AI Crawler Census: 14 Bots, 97,454 Requests, and More Knocks Than Every Search Engine Combined

We logged 1,348,706 requests across two production web properties for 174 days and classified every user-agent. AI crawlers now generate 7.2% of all observed traffic — more than Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Baiduspider, and PetalBot combined. OpenAI alone accounts for 38% of the AI crawl, 69% of AI requests still feed training pipelines, and a robots.txt honeypot shows 99% of AI-crawler violations trace to a single bot. For publishers, infrastructure teams, and anyone deciding what to do about the new tenants of the crawl economy.

June 23, 2026 18 min read

Who Runs the World's DNS: GoDaddy Owns the Default, Cloudflare Owns the Choice, and 92% of Domains Have a Single Point of Failure

We pointed an NS-typed crawl at 301 million registry domains to ask who actually answers the first question of every web request. 277.6 million are delegated, and the answer is concentrated: registrar-bundled DNS runs nearly half the delegated web, GoDaddy leads at 18.9% as the default nobody chose, and Cloudflare follows at 13.9% as the operator everybody migrates to — more than every hyperscaler cloud combined. Beneath the leaderboard sits a quieter finding: 92.5% of delegated domains depend on a single DNS organization with no independent backup. Built from 151 million-plus apex NS records.

June 22, 2026 20 min read

The Internet in India: 954 Million Users, the World's #2 IPv6 Network, and a National Web That Lives Abroad

India has 954 million internet users and the world's second-highest IPv6 capability — 78% of its users can reach the modern Internet, and Reliance Jio's all-IP network runs at ~95%. We then crawled its national namespace: 20.2 million .in hostnames, 10.2 million resolving across forward-DNS, MX, AAAA, NS, DMARC and IP-to-ASN data. The content layer tells the opposite story. Only 20% of .in domains are hosted on Indian soil — the United States alone hosts twice as much; only 20% offer IPv6 despite the world-class access network; Amazon AWS is the single largest operator of the Indian web. India consumes the Internet on world-class rails and publishes it on borrowed ground.

June 21, 2026 20 min read

Who Runs the World's Email: Google Leads Microsoft 1.4-to-1 — But Registrar-Bundled Hosting Beats Them Both

We pointed an MX-typed crawl at 390 million registered domains to ask who actually handles the Internet's email. Only 38.7% can receive mail at all. Among those that can, Google Workspace leads Microsoft 365 by 1.4 to 1 (13.2% vs 9.4%) — the inverse of the enterprise market — yet both are dwarfed by registrar- and host-bundled email, which serves nearly a third of all mail-capable domains directly and most of the long tail besides. The result is a geographic map: Google owns the Americas and the developer world, Microsoft owns Northern Europe and the Commonwealth, and domestic hosts own their home ccTLDs. Built from 151 million apex MX records.

June 20, 2026 24 min read

The Landlords of the Web: 297 Million CNAME Records Show Half the Internet Is Served by Platforms, a Fifth Is Parked, and the Dominant CDN Is Invisible

A CNAME record is a forwarding address — it names who actually serves a hostname. We pointed a CNAME-typed crawl at 1.86 billion names and found 297 million aliases. Of the 169 million that point outward, 41% land on site builders and managed hosts, 20% on domain-parking lots, and only 6% on CDNs — because Cloudflare, which fronts a quarter of the web, flattens its CNAMEs into A/AAAA and barely appears. The alias map is a rental map: the web is served by a short list of platforms, and the record type you query decides which half you can see.

June 13, 2026 18 min read

The IPv6 Mirage: Users Crossed 50%, But Only 1 in 5 Domains Answers — and Cloudflare Generates Half of That

On 28 March 2026 IPv6 crossed half of Google's traffic — the eyeball Internet reached the majority. We pointed an AAAA-typed crawl at 315 million registry domains to measure the other half of the question, and the content Internet looks nothing like it: only 20.4% of domains publish any IPv6 address, Cloudflare alone generates 44.7% of it, and 45% of all domain IPv6 is a CDN edge in front of an origin that may still be IPv4-only. Strip the CDNs and origin-native IPv6 falls to 11%. This is server-side IPv6, measured from 1.88 billion DNS answers.

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