The monthly hostcount survey always yields interesting figures. Most attention goes to the (change of) number of ``hosts'', but it would be nice to keep track of the (change of) number of zones (SOA count) as well. Especially remarkable is the average number of hosts per zone. Below are the statistics for the december 1997 TLDs with more than 3000 zones. Note the large deviation from the average for the "dk" and "fi" TLD at both ends of the scale. The relatively small number of hosts per zone is not really surprising: things are probably dominated by a large number of zones with only a very small amount of hosts. To give some insight in this matter: as per version 980108, the host utility will (in its final summary) classify the encountered zones in 5 categories depending on the number of hosts therein: empty (0), small (1-10), medium (10-100), large (100-1000), and huge (1000 or more). This may confirm the conclusion (which we already know for some time, of course): A domain name is much more important than an IP address. Now we're at it: as the host utility is doing its monthly job, it could easily accumulate other sorts of statistics as well. So if you have suggestions for additional interesting figures, just let me know. -- Eric Wassenaar TLD ZONES HOSTS HOSTS/ZONE dk 36717 169368 4 cz 7548 56869 7 tr 4405 35027 7 at 13216 108473 8 ch 23390 189175 8 pt 4761 42447 8 ie 3910 39864 10 it 23673 254296 10 pl 8221 88454 10 ALL 416339 5789853 13 de 81425 1132174 13 ru 8079 108590 13 uk 75841 1017452 13 be 7572 106808 14 nl 26126 391228 14 se 22903 348609 15 hu 3427 67887 19 il 4448 86761 19 no 13998 292382 20 fr 14509 355031 24 es 7571 196403 25 fi 7076 486811 68 [] host -V Version 980108 [] host -HS -L 999 fo. ... Encountered 289 hosts in 82 zones within fo Encountered 7 duplicate hosts in 82 zones within fo Transferred 82 zones out of 84 attempts Processed 82 zones out of 85 requests Classified 47/82 empty zones (0/289 hosts) within fo Classified 31/82 small zones (48/289 hosts) within fo Classified 3/82 medium zones (70/289 hosts) within fo Classified 1/82 large zone (171/289 hosts) within fo