The oldest domains on the internet
The DNS opened for business in 1985 — nordu.net was created on January 1, and symbolics.com became the first registered .com on March 15. Below: the earliest-registered domains among the 85,879 domains dns.pizza has analyzed with verified registration dates, and how registration grew from a handful of research labs to the modern web.
Dates as reported by each registry via WHOIS/RDAP · snapshot July 17, 2026 · check any domain's age
nordu.net
oldest analyzed domain (January 1, 1985)
85,879
domains with verified registration dates
42
years of registrations, 1985–2026
3
implausible registry dates filtered out
Registrations by year
When the analyzed web's domains were registered — each bar links to that year's domains.
The 25 oldest domains we've analyzed
Ranked by registry creation date. Two caveats that matter: when a domain expires and is re-registered, its WHOIS clock restarts — so a famous 1980s name can carry a recent date — and a few registries report dates from before their own records begin. These are the oldest dates currently reported by the registries for our corpus, not a complete history of the internet.
| # | Domain | Registered | Tranco rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | nordu.net | January 1, 1985 | #49,973 |
| 2 | chalmers.se | January 17, 1985 | #11,686 |
| 3 | lth.se | January 17, 1985 | #33,299 |
| 4 | lu.se | January 17, 1985 | #5,480 |
| 5 | symbolics.com | March 15, 1985 | #841,607 |
| 6 | nhri.org.tw | April 9, 1985 | #96,263 |
| 7 | bbn.com | April 24, 1985 | #183,173 |
| 8 | think.com | May 24, 1985 | — |
| 9 | taishinbank.com.tw | May 27, 1985 | #48,615 |
| 10 | 104.com.tw | June 26, 1985 | #4,487 |
| 11 | pchome.com.tw | July 3, 1985 | #4,055 |
| 12 | mitre.org | July 10, 1985 | #2,065 |
| 13 | kth.se | August 28, 1985 | #6,986 |
| 14 | dec.com | September 30, 1985 | #77,870 |
| 15 | northrop.com | November 7, 1985 | #584,647 |
| 16 | xerox.com | January 9, 1986 | #999 |
| 17 | sri.com | January 17, 1986 | #27,013 |
| 18 | hp.com | March 3, 1986 | #272 |
| 19 | bellcore.com | March 5, 1986 | — |
| 20 | ibm.com | March 19, 1986 | #280 |
| 21 | sun.com | March 19, 1986 | #1,324 |
| 22 | intel.com | March 25, 1986 | #433 |
| 23 | ti.com | March 25, 1986 | #2,941 |
| 24 | att.com | April 25, 1986 | #1,162 |
| 25 | cwi.nl | April 30, 1986 | #4,133 |
Four decades of domains
The ARPANET pioneers
1985–1990 · 301 analyzed domainsDNS is brand new. Registration is free, manual, and almost entirely computer companies, defense contractors and universities — the first .com (symbolics.com) arrives March 15, 1985.
Biggest namesapple.com, adobe.com, oracle.com, bbc.com, cisco.com, hp.com
The web arrives
1991–1995 · 4,101 analyzed domainsThe World Wide Web goes public and domains stop being just mail routing. By 1995 the NSF allows commercial registration fees — $100 for two years — and land-grab instincts wake up.
Biggest namesgtld-servers.net, microsoft.com, live.com, amazon.com, azure.com, office.net
The dot-com boom
1996–2000 · 14,756 analyzed domainsRegistration counts explode as every business rushes online. Most of today's household-name domains that weren't 80s tech companies date from these five years.
Biggest namesgoogle.com, facebook.com, mail.ru, akamai.net, twitter.com, office.com
After the crash
2001–2009 · 19,017 analyzed domainsThe bubble bursts but registrations keep compounding — Web 2.0, blogs and the social platforms all stake their names here.
Biggest namescloudflare.com, gstatic.com, googleapis.com, youtube.com, amazonaws.com, instagram.com
The mobile decade
2010–2019 · 26,312 analyzed domainsHundreds of new gTLDs launch (2013 onward), startups brand on .io and .co, and the .com aftermarket turns aged domains into an asset class.
Biggest namesezviz7.com, googletagmanager.com, hicloudcam.com, appsflyersdk.com, fastly.net, apple-dns.net
The modern web
2020–2026 · 21,392 analyzed domainsPandemic-era digitization, then the AI wave — and the era's dark side: phishing campaigns typically burn through domains registered only days earlier, which is exactly why checking a domain's age matters.
Biggest nameschatgpt.com, pv-cdn.net, vedcdnlb.com, app-analytics-services.com, prodregistryv2.org, vkuserphoto.ru
The oldest domain in each TLD
Earliest registry dates among analyzed domains, per top-level domain.
- symbolics.com1985
- bbn.com1985
- think.com1985
- dec.com1985
- northrop.com1985
- access-board.gov1997
- anl.gov1997
- aoc.gov1997
- attorneygeneral.gov1997
- bart.gov1997
- autoexpress.co.uk1994
- pcpro.co.uk1994
- coral.co.uk1994
- parkinsons.org.uk1994
- hulldailymail.co.uk1994
- u-ryukyu.ac.jp1993
- yokohama-cu.ac.jp1993
- doshisha.ac.jp1993
- soka.ac.jp1993
- yamaha-motor.co.jp1993
- ac-lyon.fr1994
- aeroport.fr1994
- avocat.fr1994
- banque-france.fr1994
- bnf.fr1994
- cwi.nl1986
- nwo.nl1986
- philips.nl1986
- utwente.nl1986
- surfnet.nl1987
- beobachter.ch1996
- blick.ch1996
- weltwoche.ch1996
- geneve.ch1996
- arena.ch1996
About this data
dns.pizza continuously generates domain intelligence reports, and each one records the registration date the domain's registry publishes over RDAP/WHOIS. This page aggregates the latest dated observation per domain across 101,746 analyzed domains — 85,879 of them carry a plausible creation date (85,882 report one at all; 3 pre-1985, future-dated or unparseable values are excluded as registry glitches).
These lists describe what we've analyzed, not the entire internet — though the corpus includes the historically notable early registrations alongside the Tranco top ranks. Registration dates are the registries' own claims: a domain that expired and was re-registered reports its latest registration, not its first. The domain age checker cross-checks any domain's registry age against its Internet Archive history live.
How old is your domain?
Exact registration date, age to the day, and first Internet Archive capture — free, right on the page.