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

At the end of the year 2024, the count of second-level domains under .CZ reached 1 485 493. Although this value continues to suggest saturation, the year-over-year increase of 1.1% was larger than in 2023.

The following chart shows monthly domain registrations during the last four years. While these counts follow the typical double-peaked shape (usually with a maximum in March, another smaller peak around October or November, and a minimum in July), most domain registrations in 2024 were observed in November.

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 316 429 9
WEDOS 315 596 14
ACTIVE24 189 323 32
WEBGLOBE 151 640 14
GRANSY 136 818 12
other 132 393 12
ZONER 64 087 29
MEDIA4WEB 55 901 5
WEB4U 45 755 28
THINLINE 35 249 33
1API 22 627 2
WEBSUPPORT 19 620 47

Domain Auctions

In mid-May, CZ.NIC launched the Domain Auctions service, enabling .CZ domains which were not renewed to return to the domain space. In the past, there were fights over the most attractive deleted domains, however, due to technical and administrative limitations for accessing the registry, they could only take place between a few interested parties. For this reason, CZ.NIC decided to open the market with the deleted domains to everyone and offers the vacant domains through the Domain Auctions service. The following graph suggests that in less than eight months of operation of this service, 3 389 .CZ domains were auctioned.

Web Contents

The following bar charts show 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 the this category into subcategories with specific contents is shown on the right.

Notably, the classification results in the left-hand graph suggest that relative to the previous year the share of domains with no content increased by 6.19 percentage points and domains without any text content increased by 0.87 percentage points. Both of these increases seem to be at the expense of the ordinary domains (decrease of 3.65 percentage points), parked domains (decrease of 1.9 percentage points), and domains classified as “HTTP error” (decrease of 1.63 percentage points).

Domain Geography

Each domain is registered for a concrete domain holder, which may be a person or a company. Obviously, most of the .CZ domains (1 351 775, i.e. 91%) 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. In comparison to the previous year, slight increases in domain counts were observed in all regions. The highest relative increase was observed in the Plzeňský region (3.95%, 1 809 domains), followed by Jihomoravský (2.74%, 4 511 domains), Karlovarský (2.6%, 423 domains), Zlínský (2.6%, 1 683 domains), and Pardubický region (2.6%, 1 311 domains). In Praha, the increase was at 1.58% (6 607 domains). The smallest increase of 0.81% (425 domains) was observed in the Ústecký region.

Region Domains per 100 citizens
Praha 423 922 32.15
Jihomoravský 169 414 14.23
Středočeský 146 346 10.59
Moravskoslezský 102 138 8.50
Zlínský 65 734 11.28
Jihočeský 56 865 8.83
Ústecký 52 807 6.43
Pardubický 51 490 9.87
Královéhradecký 51 260 9.29
Plzeňský 47 588 8.08
Olomoucký 47 536 7.52
Vysočina 39 438 7.74
Liberecký 39 173 8.83
Karlovarský 16 500 5.60
Unknown 41 564 –

The share of domains held by foreign holders is currently 9%. The distribution of domains among Top ten countries of their domicile are shown in the table below.

Country Domains
Slovakia 28 580 28580
United States 27 048 27048
Germany 15 456 15456
Poland 7 680 7680
United Kingdom 6 178 6178
China 5 148 5148
France 5 116 5116
Netherlands 4 119 4119
Bulgaria 3 472 3472
Switzerland 2 589 2589
Other 28 273 28273

The following slope graph shows the changes of the above domain counts in the last four years. Notably, the count of domains with US holders decreased, ending a period of their growth observed in the previous years. After a similarly shaped, albeit far less rapid period of growth, the count of German-held domains also decreased. The decrease in domains held by the Chinese now continues for a second year in a row. The trends for the domains held by the Slovak and Polish holders kept their usual pace of steady increase. Interestingly, there seems to be a continuously rising influx of Bulgarian-held domains, although their count still remains relatively low. Lastly, the count of domains with Swiss holders continues its downfall, reaching the last rank in this Top ten list.