RIPE Region Hostcount
FAQ
- What is a host?
- What is a real host?
- Why are you trying to do a zone
transfer from my domain?
- Is there similar information for all
TLDs, not just those in the RIPE NCC Service Region?
- Why does the number of hosts
increase and decrease so much?
- What is the xx TLD?
1. What is a host?
For the purposes of Hostcount, a host is a domain name, such as
a-host.a-com.de., sited at a leaf node of the domain
name tree. In practice, all A records in the Domain Name
System (DNS) are eligible to be counted as hosts, but many are discarded,
for instance because they have already been seen elsewhere.
 Top
2. What's a real host ?
A real host is a non-duplicate host. The number of real hosts
for a particular TLD is equal to the counted hosts minus the
number of duplicate hosts. Duplicate hosts are those hosts that
have already counted during the Hostcount.
Top
3. Why are you trying to do a zone
transfer from my domain?
The zone transfer is an integral part of performing the RIPE
NCC Region Hostcount. It is performed once at the end of each month
for the purpose of generating summary statistics about the growth of the
Internet.
The RIPE NCC apologises for any concern that may have been caused by
an unexpected attempt at a zone transfer. We would be extremely grateful
if you would enable zone transfers for requests originating from the address
range 193.0.0.0/22.
If you have further questions or concerns, please contact: hostcount@ripe.net.
Top
4. Is there similar information for all
TLDs, not just those in the RIPE NCC Service Region?
The Internet Software Consortium carries out a survey of the entire
Internet approximately every six months.
Top
5. What's the xx TLD?
The RIPE NCC Hostcount is a Domain Name System (DNS) hostcount.
The following TLDs are historical and their hosts and zones should not
increase dramatically:
- gb - Great Britain - now covered by uk
- su - Soviet Union - now covered by multiple TLDs
Top
6. Why does the number of hosts
increase and decrease so much?
The Hostcount collects its data via zone transfers. Many organisations
are increasingly wary of allowing zone transfers of their domain for security
reasons. It's also possible that some organsations wish to restrict zone
transfers due to the increased load on their nameserver.
The impact of restricting zone transfers for a zone is that all the data
about the zone and its child zones is lost.
The two primary reasons for major decreases in the number of hosts counted
for a TLD can be identified as:
-
A provider, whose nameserver runs secondary for many of its customers,
decides to restrict zone transfers, either via the nameserver config
or an Access Control List (ACL), so that the machine doing the Hostcount
loses access to hundreds or thousands of small zones at the same time,
each of which has a few hosts.
- An end-user/provider with a very large zone decides to restrict transfers
so that all of the hosts in the zone are lost to the Hostcount.
Major increases in the number of hosts occur when there is no restriction.
|
You are here: home -> Info -> Statistics -> Hostcount
