With the one million active domain name registrations approaching for .AT, the Austrian registry nic.at has released its third .at report. There are currently 998,478 .AT domains registered and with over 7,000 already registered this month the one million mark is only days away.

      In 2010 there were 165,145 new .AT registrations, 432,599 data changes and 95,057 deletions - a total of almost 700,000 transactions for the year to the date of the report.

      While some 80% of registered domains live to see their first birthday, the majority are in fact cancelled in the first three years. If a domain crosses the magic three-year threshold, the chances of its long-term survival are extremely high.

      The report explains the reason for the high domain mortality rates. In many cases domains are only required for a single campaign, and some are simply cast off by domain traders if they fail to generate sufficient returns. At present the average age of all 980,000 .AT domains at the time of the report is three and a half years.

      However the third edition of the report focuses on what happens when you type a domain name, and in particular a .AT domain name, into your web browser, or click on a link to a .AT domain name.

      There are seven name servers around the world, which front 50 server systems also around the world, 15 of which are operated by nic.at directly, while there are two independent Anycast operators that look after the remainder, making Austria one of the international leaders. Nic.at has plans to make the .AT zone even more accessible in future: in 2011 the RcodeZero Anycast cloud operated by nic.at subsidiary IPCom will start testing in a move designed to make queries for the .AT zone even faster and more secure.

      Of the name servers that nic.at monitors, it is the German servers that handle the most queries with over 50 million queries in a single week, from 1 to 7 November 2010. The name server located in Austria received the second-most number of queries (43,717,593) followed by the Netherlands (just under 35 million) and the US (almost 30 million). Brazil, Sweden, Czech Republic and Hong Kong made up the rest of the nine.

      The report also shows that an analysis of queries by country of origin confirms that the nic.at name servers have been set up in the right locations, with the report noting this guarantees low response times without generating unnecessary international traffic - the majority of the queries during the period originated in Germany (280 million), Austria (247 million) and the USA (583 million).

      The report also looks at some .AT trivia. One piece of trivia is about the domain name zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.at - the last possible .AT domain name that can be registered.  The domain fulfils a very important role though.

      The .AT zone is updated several times daily on all name servers in a process termed "zone transfer". However, it is essential that updates pass off without a hitch otherwise some or all of the .AT sites would be unavailable. The zone transfer will not be concluded until this domain has been added to the zone. This is just one of the many control mechanisms employed by nic.at.

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