CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o, is an interest association of legal entities, founded in 1998 by leading providers of Internet services in the Czech Republic. The principal duties and activities of the association include operation of the .CZ domain registry and DNS servers for the .CZ top-level domain (TLD).

The annual domain report is an on-line publication that offers key statistical facts about the status and dynamics of the Czech country-code TLD (ccTLD), which is primarily used by subjects in the Czech Republic – individuals and organisations.

The graphs and tables are organised into several sections illustrating various aspects of the registry and domain operation. Most charts are interactive: additional information can be obtained by placing the mouse cursor over graphical components of such a chart. In multivariate graphs, each variable can be switched off or on by clicking on the corresponding entry in the legend.

Domain Registrations

After a period of accelerated growth during the covid years, in the last two years the total number of .CZ domains shows signs of saturation again. In 2023, the year-over-year increase was only 0.4%, which is even less than the YoY increase in 2019. The number of second-level domains registered under .CZ reached 1 468 788 by the end of 2023.

The following chart shows monthly domain registrations during the last four years. Again, the numbers are quite similar to pre-covid years and follow the typical camel-like shape with a maximum in March and another (usually smaller) peak in October-December.

Registrars

Market shares of leading registrars and their dynamics are displayed in the following table and graph, respectively. The rightmost table column shows approximate percentages of parked domains in the portfolio of each registrar. Parked domains were classified by a machine-learning algorithm with an accuracy of 92%.

Registrar Domains Parked (%)
INTERNET-CZ 310 152 8
WEDOS 295 985 25
ACTIVE24 190 335 32
GRANSY 153 002 11
WEBGLOBE 143 147 13
other 128 532 20
ZONER 63 933 28
MEDIA4WEB 54 940 5
WEB4U 47 213 28
THINLINE 31 263 31
1API 28 664 18
TELE3 21 570 13

Web Contents

The following bar charts give the results of an automatic classification of all second-level domains according to the contents of their “home” web pages. A machine learning algorithm was applied to the source data provided by DNS crawler. See ADAM Report 2/2020 for details.

The graph on the left gives a baseline classification into seven classes. Ordinary domains denote all domains that do not fall into one of the other six categories. A detailed breakdown of this category into subcategories with specific contents is shown on the right.

Domain Geography

Each domain is registered for a concrete domain holder, which may be a person or a company – either holder category has a share of almost exactly 50%. Obviously, most of the .CZ domains (1 326 810, i.e. 90.33%) have holders with Czech addresses. The following table and map show their distribution among the 14 regions of the Czech Republic, as well as the number of domains per 100 citizens. The regions with the highest relative increase in the number of domains are Jihomoravský (2.8%) and Středočeský (2.55). On the other hand, we observe a decrease of 2.4% for Praha, which is unusual and likely to be caused by the verification of domain holder addresses performed in 2023.

Region Domains per 100 citizens
Praha 417 315 31.65
Jihomoravský 164 903 13.85
Středočeský 143 103 10.36
Moravskoslezský 100 851 8.40
Zlínský 64 051 10.99
Jihočeský 55 852 8.68
Ústecký 52 382 6.38
Pardubický 50 179 9.62
Královéhradecký 50 169 9.10
Olomoucký 46 607 7.37
Plzeňský 45 779 7.78
Vysočina 38 665 7.58
Liberecký 38 503 8.68
Karlovarský 16 077 5.46
Unknown 42 374 –

The share of domains held by foreign holders is currently 9.67%. The distribution of domains among top-ten countries of their domicile are shown in the table below.

Country Domains
United States 33 742 33742
Slovakia 27 825 27825
Germany 17 148 17148
Poland 7 447 7447
China 7 350 7350
United Kingdom 6 316 6316
France 5 027 5027
Netherlands 3 992 3992
Italy 2 945 2945
Switzerland 2 825 2825
Other 27 361 27361

The following slope graph shows the changes of the above domain counts in the last three years. The previous rapid increase for USA slowed down whereas the number of domains held by Chinese and Italian holders dropped down significantly.

The world-wide distribution of .CZ domain holder addresses is in the following zoomable map. Obviously, a vast majority of holders are concentrated in Western Europe and USA. In 2023, new domain holders emerged, for example, in Benin, Kyrgyzstan and Laos.