Most commonly used DNS name servers on the internet

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a vital part of the internet as we know it today. To put it simply, DNS is like a phonebook of the internet. Domains, such as dataprovider.com or google.com, are used to access information online. Just as a house has an address, a domain has an accompanying address as well: this is called an Internet Protocol address (IP address). One of the functions of the DNS is to eliminate the scenario in which people have to type in the IP addresses into their web browser. DNS was invented to translate IP addresses into domain names and vice versa.

Name servers show of which DNS provider a domain makes use of. All domains usually have at least two DNS servers, for example, ns51.domaincontrol.com and ns52.domaincontrol.com: requests to access a website will then be processed by either n1.example.com or ns2.example.com.

As Dataprovider.com indexes over 600 million domains every month and thus has an almost complete picture of the internet infrastructure, we can see the distribution of name servers and detect the top five. The name servers of a domain are most often owned by the registrar. A person that registers a new domain at GoDaddy will probably make use of GoDaddy’s ns.domaincontrol.com. There’s also the possibility of using paid name server providers such as CloudFlare, Akamai or Dyn. This is sometimes done by companies that need to have excellent uptime and reliability on their domain.

Our structured Search Engine shows that currently GoDaddy (domaincontrol.com) is the most commonly used DNS name server by a wide margin, followed by the security and hosting company CloudFlare. DNS.com, which belongs to the Chinese-based hosting company eName, ranks third. Google takes fourth place, while registrar-servers.com, which belongs to the American company NameCheap Inc, is fifth in our ranking.

We’ll keep an eye on this trend to see if it’ll shift in the near future.