Full .com zone census puts GoDaddy and Cloudflare behind a third of all DNS

A count of every name in the .com zone has found that GoDaddy and Cloudflare together operate nameservers for roughly a third of the 167 million registered .com domains. The census, carried out by NameDaemon and published on dev.to, examined the zone on 8 October 2026 and grouped each name under the company behind its first nameserver.

GoDaddy leads with 36,254,891 names, or 21.66% of the zone, according to the analysis. Cloudflare takes second place with 21,649,792 names, or 12.94%. Between them, the top two cover about 35% of .com, a notable concentration for a system designed to spread load across many operators.

The rest of the top ten

Google Domains ranks third with 7,831,569 names (4.68%), ahead of Namecheap at 6,126,924 (3.66%). Fifth-placed dns-parking.com accounts for 5,217,859 names (3.12%), and Afternic, which the ranking lists as a GoDaddy marketplace, covers another 5,044,711 (3.01%). Wix, NameBright, Alibaba Cloud and Amazon Route 53 fill out the top ten, with Route 53 at 2,323,462 names, or 1.39%.

NameDaemon puts the top 15 providers at around 62% of all names, with a long tail of thousands of smaller operators sharing the remainder. The company says it updates the full ranking daily.

Habit explains GoDaddy, choice explains Cloudflare

The analysis attributes the concentration to a simple fact: most domain owners never pick a DNS provider. Their registrar or web host chooses one for them. GoDaddy's first place largely reflects its registrar business, since customers who register a name there tend to keep the default nameservers. Cloudflare's position is different. NameDaemon says many owners move their DNS to it deliberately, drawn by speed and a free plan. One lead comes from habit, the other from choice.

Parked names pad the totals

Not every name in the table points at a real website. dns-parking.com appears to be a parking service, and Afternic is a marketplace for names listed for sale; together they account for about 6% of the zone. Parked names resolve to advertising or for-sale pages rather than live sites, so the proportion of names backing working websites is lower than the raw ranking implies.

What the census cannot show

The method has limits the authors are upfront about. Each name is counted once, under its first nameserver, so a name using two providers appears under only one of them. Provider labels are described as best guesses for well-known companies, while unfamiliar operators show their raw nameserver name. DNS is also not hosting: a domain can use one company to answer queries and another to store its pages, so the table maps who answers DNS questions, not who serves content. The underlying data comes from the .com zone file that Verisign, the registry operator, publishes daily.

Why it matters

Because DNS sits in the middle of every lookup, an outage at one large provider can take millions of names offline at the same time. NameDaemon notes that this has happened to big providers in the past and argues it will happen again. Concentration also sharpens security risks: a single account controlling a domain, its website and its DNS is a softer target, which is why the analysis suggests keeping DNS with a separate provider as a backup and retaining a copy of all records. For network operators and anyone planning resilience, the census is a reminder that the internet's largest namespace leans on a short list of companies that most of its 167 million names never chose.