VeriSign, one of the world’s largest Internet registers, handling .com and .net domains, has released new data about web domain registration for the first quarter of 2009. Registrations have gone up 12 percent from last year but the biggest news is the increase in .com and .net registrations.

In total there are currently 183 million Top Level Domain Names registered, which is a 3 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase from last year. Country Code Top Level Domain Names also rose 18 percent year over year and 4 percent from the last quarter, to 74.1 million.

The most interesting growth is in .com and .net domain names, which saw a decrease in number for the most part of last year. “New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the first quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. This 17 percent increase from the previous quarter also marked the first positive growth rate in new registrations since the first quarter of 2008,” the report reads. These numbers might be a good indicator that the economy is getting healthier and that businesses are more likely to enter a new stage.

Also on the rise are domain name renewals, which have been falling since the first quarter of 2007, going from a maximum of 77 percent in Q4 2006 to 70 percent in Q4 2008. The first quarter of 2009 brought the first increase in two years, rising to 71 percent.

CcTLD's growth easily surpassed the .com and .net growth with the biggest rise coming from the .us domain followed by .ru. Also, .cn saw a rise of 4 percent, a slightly slower rate than previous quarters, but it still is the second most popular domain after .com, which has a comfortable lead, ahead of .de and .net, which came in fourth.