WoodCentral: 28 years and counting

Can we determine a reasonable estimate of how many domains have been in continuous operation for over 20 years?

Yes, but only as an estimate. The important distinction is between a domain name that has been registered for more than 20 years and a website that has remained in continuous operation for more than 20 years. The latter is a much smaller group, and there is no comprehensive public census of such websites.

As of October 2026, we’re looking for websites that were already operating before October 2006 and have continued operating ever since.

What the available data tells us

• The internet had approximately 386.9 million registered domain names at the end of 2025, according to VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief. This includes domains that host no functioning website.
• Research presented at the 2024 iPRES digital-preservation conference examined 27.3 million archived URLs. Only 35% remained active in 2023, illustrating how much web content disappears. Nearly half of the URLs first archived in 1996–2000 were still active in 2023. These are URL-level findings, however, not a count of continuously operating domains.

Neither source directly tells us how many websites have survived continuously for 20 years. We need to estimate that separately.

My estimate

For the entire internet, I would use the following rough estimates, rather than claim an exact count.

Definition	Estimated number worldwide
Domains registered 20+ years ago, regardless of whether they host a working website	Millions to tens of millions
Domains hosting websites that are active today and have a 20-year history	Perhaps 2–5 million
Websites demonstrably operating continuously under the same domain, with no meaningful interruption	Unknown; likely fewer

The 2–5 million figure is a reasoned working estimate, not a published statistic. It extrapolates from research on the survival of website root URLs and the historical size of the domain-name market. The available studies do not establish a reliable global count of continuously operating websites.

There is also an important qualification: a website can survive for 20 years while changing owners, hosting companies, software and content. If you’re counting sites that have remained available to visitors throughout that period, rather than sites that merely retain an old domain registration, the definition matters considerably.

For WoodCentral’s preservation initiative, I would describe these sites as a small but significant part of the web’s accumulated knowledge, without publishing a numerical claim until better data is available. A domain-age search combined with Internet Archive history checks could produce a more defensible estimate for a particular category, such as independent hobbyist and enthusiast websites.