Every internet connection starts with a DNS query — the question of where does this domain live? The servers that answer that question are the nameservers, and despite being one of the most foundational pieces of internet infrastructure, public data on who actually operates them is surprisingly thin.

We pulled the nameserver records for every apex zone in the DNSArchive database to find out. The dataset contains over 509 million DNS records, of which 40,935,013 are apex domains with their own NS records. (Subdomains inherit nameservers from their parent zone, so they don't count toward provider market share.) Filtering was done using the Mozilla Public Suffix List to correctly identify registrable apexes across all gTLDs and ccTLDs.

Three things stood out in the results, and we'll cover each below: GoDaddy still leads, Cloudflare is closer than people think, and roughly 8% of all apex zones on the internet are parked or for sale.

🏆 The Top 20 Nameserver Providers

Across 40.9 million apex zones, here are the top 20 nameserver providers by zone count. Together they account for roughly half of all zones on the internet.

👑 GoDaddy Still Leads — But Cloudflare Is Closer Than You Think

GoDaddy has been the world's largest domain registrar for years, and the nameserver data confirms what that scale translates to: roughly 1 in every 7 apex domains on the internet resolves through a GoDaddy nameserver (*.domaincontrol.com). Add their Afternic and Squarespace acquisitions and the share grows further.

What's less expected is the gap. Cloudflare — despite a much smaller registrar business and a free DNS tier that became popular only recently in DNS-time — is at 9.56% share with nearly 4 million zones. That's about two-thirds of GoDaddy's count, achieved largely by site owners pointing existing domains at Cloudflare for performance and security regardless of where the domain was registered. The trajectory matters: if Cloudflare keeps growing at recent rates while GoDaddy's organic growth flattens, the rankings could flip in 2027 or 2028.

Below the top two, the drop is steep. 1&1 IONOS at 2.88% is the largest European DNS operator, and the third-place spot reflects how big Germany's web-hosting market really is — combined with Strato, Hetzner, and other German hosts, the country punches above its weight in the global nameserver leaderboard.

🅿️ The Parking Surprise: ~8% of All Apex Zones Are For Sale

Six of the top 20 nameserver providers in our data are domain parking and aftermarket services: Afternic, NameBright, ParkingCrew, Bodis, Sedo, and Above.com. Add the for-sale-domain marketplaces that operate their own NS infrastructure (HugeDomains, Dan.com, namefind.com, aftermarket.pl), and the total exceeds 3.2 million zones — roughly 7.9% of every apex domain on the internet.

Put differently: about 1 in every 13 domains you encounter has nameservers pointing at a parking page rather than a working website. That number includes premium domains awaiting a buyer, expired-but-renewed names being held for resale, typosquats, and trademark-defense registrations. It's a much larger fraction of the addressable web than most people would guess, and it's a good reminder that the internet's DNS layer is shaped as much by the domain-aftermarket economy as by the websites people actually visit.

🌍 The Long Tail Is Still Huge

Even with 40 of the largest providers identified, roughly 40% of apex zones use nameservers we couldn't classify into a major brand. This is the long tail of regional registrars, country-specific hosters, in-house corporate nameservers, ISPs that bundle DNS, and the thousands of small hosting companies that each run a few thousand zones. DNS is more decentralized than the cloud-computing narrative suggests, and that decentralization is structurally hard to disrupt — new entrants would have to peel zones off thousands of incumbents, not just two or three.

Notable names just outside the top 20 included Reg.ru (Russia), Gname (China-focused registrar), SiteGround, WordPress.com, HostGator, DreamHost, Gandi, eNom, Tencent DNSPod, Akamai, and Yandex. Each runs hundreds of thousands of zones, but none cracks 1% individually.

📐 Methodology

Snapshot date: May 7, 2026. Source: the DNSArchive database, containing 509,460,956 total DNS records collected through passive DNS observation. We pulled every record where the NS field was populated, then filtered to apex zones using the Mozilla Public Suffix List — a row was kept only if domain == public_suffix_apex(domain). This excluded approximately 15.6 million subdomain entries whose “NS” values were CNAME-chain artifacts rather than real authoritative nameservers, leaving 40,935,013 apex zones.

For each zone, we extracted the registrable apex of every NS hostname (e.g., ns-112.awsdns-14.com becomes awsdns-14.com, which we mapped to AWS Route 53). Each zone counts once per provider regardless of how many NS records it has at that provider — so a zone with four cloudflare.com nameservers contributes 1 to Cloudflare's count, not 4.

Provider grouping merges multiple SLDs into a single brand where applicable: Akamai's twelve nameserver SLDs (akam.net, akamaiedge.net, akadns.net, edgekey.net, etc.), AWS Route 53's four-TLD pattern (awsdns-NN.{com,net,org,co.uk}), Microsoft's Azure DNS variants, and so on. SLDs we couldn't confidently attribute to a known brand are reported under their raw SLD — visible as items like dns.com, technorail.com, kasserver.com in the long-tail position.

🔎 Verify It Yourself

Every number in this report can be reproduced against the live DNSArchive database. Use the free search interface to look up nameserver records for any domain, or grab an API key to run aggregate queries at scale. We publish the underlying data so analysts and researchers can build on it.

🧭 Related Reading

If this report was useful, you may also want to read:

• What Is Passive DNS? — the foundation of how we collect this data.
• How to Look Up Historical DNS Records for Any Domain
• Tracking Domain Infrastructure Over Time with DNSArchive
• How DNS Changes Can Reveal Malicious Infrastructure

We'll re-run this analysis annually. The May 2027 edition will include year-over-year movement, and we expect Cloudflare's gap with GoDaddy to narrow further. If you want to be notified when the next State of DNS lands, follow us on Twitter or check back at /articles.